The War On Boys

Blowing off the dust and clearing the cobwebs here so I can put up a new post. Geez...it's been a while.

There's been another school shooting, which means it's time for another toxic "debate" on gun laws. I use scare quotes there because, as we all know, there's no real debate, just meaningless posturing and moral preening from the gun grabbers and repeated denials that they don't really want to take away your guns when we know that's just not true.

But as always with these incidents, our shitty politics drives everyone into a pointless argument over the tool used by the latest unhinged high school kid while we all studiously ignore the more important point: Why in the hell are so many boys opening fire on their classmates? If over the last 20 years there'd been a rising trend of boys stabbing their classmates to death, what would we all be talking about? Surely not "common sense" knife control. Instead, we'd be having a more useful debate over what's causing boys to act out in such a horrifying way. It's time to separate the debate over why school shooters do what they do from the debate over the tools that they use.

I hate to break out the "back in my day" shtick, but when I was a kid in elementary school, boys were allowed to be boys. We played tag (sometimes aggressively), we played dodgeball (very often aggressively), and we got into fist fights. By the time we were in high school, we'd more or less sorted our shit out. Not that we were all perfectly well-adjusted young adults or anything like that, but we weren't complete and total assholes, either.

But something happened starting in the 1980s or thereabouts, and boys were no longer allowed to be boys. Boys became something to be feared and despised and, ultimately, controlled. In the process, boys' natural tendency towards aggressive play became something to be suppressed and stigmatized. These observations are nothing new. Christina Hoff Sommers wrote on this topic 18 years ago.

But it's not just what's happening in schools. In media and pop culture, one of the few remaining acceptable objects of ridicule is the American male. Just watch TV for a while, and watch the non-stop parade of male inferiority. Here's just one example of it in an Allstate commercial currently airing pretty regularly. The open contempt for males is palpable.

It's time we had an honest discussion about the "war on boys" and its links to school shootings.

Gun owners...the new drunk drivers

It occurs to me that the campaign against American gun owners can be compared to the campaign against drunk driving of the early 1980s. I came to this realization during an e-mail exchange I was having with a group of co-workers on the whole gun control debate, and the more I think about it, the more apt I think the comparison is. I'll just paste below a portion of an e-mail I sent on that thread:


...The larger point is that if the gun control lobby’s goal is, truly, to place “reasonable” limits on private ownership of firearms, they’ll have to do so with a Constitutional amendment. As things stand now, they get to hop in front of the TV cameras whenever something horrifying like Sandy Hook goes down, gnash their teeth and rend their garments…and let the donations pour in. But if they got their way, they’d have two choices: Cease operations and hit the unemployment line or…push for even MORE restrictions.

Take a look at MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers). I’m old enough to remember when they came into being. Before MADD, getting popped for drunk driving generally meant having the cops take your car keys and getting tossed into the drunk tank until you sobered up. It was only if you actually damaged property or injured or killed someone as a result of drunk driving that there were any real consequences. Then MADD was founded by a lady after (IIRC) her daughter was killed by a drunk driver. This lady was tireless in her efforts to make drunk driving a national issue, and she succeeded. Pretty soon, every state had laws on their books limiting blood alcohol content to .10. Victory! This lady could now get on with her life, right? Not so fast there, Skippy. MADD eventually decided that .10 was too high, and pushed for levels of .08 as a standard. Once again, MADD got their way, and now just about every state sets the legal limit at .08. Along the way, the penalties have gotten more and more severe, we have roadblocks set up specifically for the purpose of finding tipsy drivers, and there’s talk about lowering the BAC limit to .04.

It. Never. Ends.

Note: At the time of writing that e-mail I excerpted here I was writing off the top of my head, so some clarification is in order. First, it's Mothers Against Drunk DrivING, not DrivERS as I originally wrote. Second, it was, indeed, the mother's daughter who was killed by a drunk driver. The woman who founded MADD is Candace Lightner, and she left the group after five years because they didn't know when to quit.

Monster spray

I've let this blog go sort of inactive lately, but it's hard to let something as horrific as last week's shootings in Connecticut to go by without comment.

When children are very young, they often harbor a fear of the dark that manifests itself as a fear of monsters under the bed or in the closet. As parents we do our best to assuage these fears, and sometimes play along with those fears with such monster countermeasures as spraying air freshener in the room while explaining to the troubled youngster that it's "monster spray" which keeps monsters out.

This is, in effect, what the anti-gun crowd is doing with all the gun laws they'll be proposing over the coming weeks. What happened last week in Newtown, CT was as awful an event as we're likely to see for some time, and it goes without saying that nobody on either side of the gun debate wants to see anything like that happen again. But while the anti-gun crowd is clamoring for monster spray, the pro-gun side of the debate is begging to do something about the monsters.

But don't take it from me, take it from St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch:

If there’s somebody that’s really hellbent on doing something like this, they’re not going to care what the law is.

Chief Fitch advocates arming school personnel much like many airline pilots are now armed as a last-ditch defense against skyjacking.

Doug Ross points out the futility of gun-free zones in this post, and Gateway Pundit points out that besides gun-free zones, the other thing all these recent cases of mass shootings have in common is undiagnosed (or untreated) mental illness.

But this won't stop politicians from rushing out useless legislation rooted in emotional response and wasting everyone's time and energy on equipping us all with monster spray.

Update: Oh, and by the way...don't count on the media's vast expertise in firearms to correctly frame the debate.