Since the horrible shooting at Sandy Hook last December schools, parents, and the nation as a whole have all been left trying to figure out how this could have been prevented. I too sat around in the days following the tragedy wondering where things had gone so terribly wrong. My heart ached for the families. I am a mother. I can not actually even begin to comprehend the loss. I can only know that even the thought of losing one of my sons paralyzes me. I know life would never again be the same. As our nation mourned we opened up the debate on gun violence more fervently then ever before. While the argument raged on we sent our children back to school and hoped that they were safe.
The search for answers left us with no answers. People were left fearful. Some schools decided the best option was to have teachers armed with guns. Other schools tried to profile students hoping they could determine which kid is the next threat to society. Teachers and parents are all on high alert. In the midst of this of the chaos my 5th grader and his friend drew some pictures of aliens fighting. This set off a chain of events that disturbed me and frightened me on a whole new level.
Pictures like the one above have been drawn by little boys for as long as they have been able to draw. I am sure thousands of years ago little Roman boys were drawing pictures of chariots attacking each other. The teacher did not see it that way. She grabbed the picture from the boys and began to lecture the entire class about how pictures like this are how mass murderers are created. WTF? Seriously. This is the first step down the slope to becoming a mass murderer? Finally someone has the answer but she is not sharing it with anyone but a class full of eleven year olds.
The future mass murderers were sent to the principal and told that drawing war scenes was part of the zero tolerance for violence in the schools. The boys left the principals office confused. The library was full of books about war. Those books had pictures of tanks, guns, bombs, and other accouterments to war. The teacher talked in class about her boyfriend in the military and the guns he used to protect our country. History books that they were required to study detailed wars. I am pretty sure I remember 80% of history class in school being about one war or another. Our country had been at war for almost the entire lifespan of these boys. I was pregnant with my son when 9/11 happened. He was six months old as I watched shock and awe unfold. From the time he was an infant war had been something he heard about and saw because it was a part of our nations unfolding history. These two boys, who were drawing pictures like lots of boys before them, walked through school the rest of the day feeling like they were what was wrong in the world and possibly the harbingers of death and destruction.
I have three brothers. They all drew war scenes and played war. Our home was a no gun zone. This did not stop the boys from turning toast into guns. My mom has a notebook filled with seventy-five pages of war scenes that one of my brother drew at church. While he was supposed to be taking in the glory of the lord, he instead drew destruction. Good news is we somehow avoided the horrid fate that awaited them and all of my brothers grew up to be a normal non mass murdering adults. How did we avoid this though? When clearly they had taken the first steps down that path so long ago. If boys portraying war and having an interest in guns is truly the key, how is that no one I know committed such horrific acts?
One hundred children can draw war scenes and if one of them goes on to commit an atrocity everyone is going to point their finger and say Ahha! this must be the reason. This logic is applied across the board to all activities that a murderer was interested in. Violent video games movies, a song, a book, and the list can go on. Logically this makes no sense. Let's look at one example out of many. Call of Duty Black Ops 2 is a first person shooter game. I have watched my husband play it. It is all guns and shooting. You have missions to slaughter people. 7.5 million copies of this game were sold. That is at minimum 7.5 million people with access to this mind altering madness. That does not even take into account households with multiple people such as mine. One copy with four people in the home. That number could feasibly triple. However let's just look at the base figure of 7.5 million. If this was one of the catalyst that was pushing people to depart from humanity and commit horrid crimes, would we not see an actual epidemic of this. With 7.5 million people exposed we would certainly see more than the 3-4 horrific acts that we saw last year.
At the end of the day none of those things are what made someone step away from humanity. There is nothing we can pin point and say is the cause. This scares the shit out of us. We need to understand why someone strays so far from the path of normalcy. As a teenager I had an obsession with serial killers. Not because I wanted to be one thank you very much. It was because my brain could not wrap around it. How? Why? What? I wanted to understand. The crimes that people committed were so far beyond my ability to comprehend and I wanted answers. I wrote a research paper about it hoping I would find something to explain it all to me. What I found was there is no perfect recipe that creates that void within someone. Some had horrid childhoods. Lots of people do. They don't all turn around and murder thirty people.Some had wonderful loving parents. Well crap. Now what do you do? There was no definitive thread of commonality that screamed "This is how a serial killer is born!!!!."
As I told my sons on the day of the shootings human brains are like computers. Most of the time they work exactly as they have been programmed to work. We move along our day and our existence with our brains doing the job they were intended to. That job includes providing us a sense of right and wrong. Sometimes their is an error in the brain. We see an error message but it doesn't tell us where the error came from.Why did that one computer, in the same environment, with the same set-up, same updates, same everything behave differently? It is a miracle that with as complex as our brains our these errors happen so little.
Our desperation to understand leads us on a modern day witch hunt. My son was humiliated in front of his entire class. When I talked to the teacher about this she defended her actions as protecting my son. She said a new profiling was being started and because my son was quiet and really liked to draw war scenes he would be a target of this profiling. Funny thing is this profiling doesn't take into account so many little elements of my sons personality. His father is very shy. He was always the quiet kid in class. Yes he drew war scenes like nobodies business. So his quiet thoughtfulness never worried me because he is his father's son. These profiles will not know this. My son has had lots of obsessions in his short span of existence. One of them was My Little Pony. Yup rainbows and being friends. His list of obsessions doesn't end there. Seals, Pokemon, rocks, Hot Wheels, Indiana Jones, and Legos. The last year or so we have watched him obsess over Minecraft and Halo Megabloks. He falls in love with something, learns everything there is to learn about it and then moves on. It's how he has always been. They won't know that. They also won't know that he has a deep affinity for animals and can not stand to see them harmed. He is afraid of bees. He loves the ocean and could swim for hours. His brother is his best friend even if he doesn't realize it now. He is a momma's boy and fiercely protective of my feelings. All these things will never be seen because their profile says look for the quiet kid in class drawing guns.
The whole fiasco ended out OK. The teacher apologized because she realized that she had gone overboard. I understand her fear. She needs to understand mine though. Our kids are being stripped of their ability to be kids more and more everyday. They live in a world where we have all become so afraid that we fear living itself to some point. By becoming so terrified of these people that have committed horrible acts, we are giving them a power they don't deserve. We have become terrified creatures striking out at each other in fear. I just want my son to have a childhood in a world full of madness. Drawing war scenes is part of that childhood.
