Thousands of miles away from here in a tiny west coast town, a sad community buried two of their young people last week.

It seems like another time when the headlines about young people being shot
were mostly in urban areas. It is still the stuff of legend, so to speak. 

A child, it seems, is now more at risk of being shot in the suburbs than in the city.

Now, it seems that the subject of the reasons why kids kill is important. 

There once was a time when the act of a child pulling a trigger was considered by some to be a behavior somehow deemed victimless. 

School shootings were tied to drugs, gang activity, or any of a number of other "issues" that were of little interest to the rest of America, tucked away in their little hamlets and cul de sacs.

We, as a people, have been burying our children, who were killed in many
cases by other children, for a long time now.  In fact, many of us are wondering about why there is all the hoopla over it now. The answer to that is rather obvious.

The drug epidemic of the 60s, 70s and 80s in our communities didn’t
get national attention until people were smoking crack in barns and cornfields in the 80s and 90s.  It appears the same pattern of delayed awareness has hit the country relative to gun violence. 

Last week, several children in suburban areas were caught with weapons in their school.  The youngest was eight years old. Where are they getting the weapons from? 

In many of the cases it is the parents, who somehow forgot the days when they were young, and could get over, around, and through the restrictions and blocks of their own parents.

The seeds of violence are more likely to grow when the ground around it is
fertile.  All the talk about the influence of television, and records and movies in
my opinion is only valid in the absence of easy access to weapons of death. 
In a city where many of the same problems related to drugs, gangs and poor
conflict resolving skills still exist, we have been spared from the scenes so
many children in the suburbs have been exposed to.  This is in great part due
to tighter security measures taken at many of our schools, with metal detectors at our urban schools.

Kids will always pick on kids. 

It happened when I was a student in the hallways of JHS 192. But in my opinion, the factor that makes these times different from generations past is the accessibility.  There are more than 270 million guns in the United States. That’s is almost as many guns as people. For what?

The other factor appears to be the pent up energy factor.  Several years ago a Republican-controlled Congress took money away from "after-school" programs because it seemed that they weren’t needed. 

Now it seems there could be a move to put the money back. 

After decades of one stigma it appears that it is little Johnny and little Jamal that people need to be afraid of. For a myriad of reasons that also includes being a product of their so-called environment.  It appears that even two parents, who have set up so-called traditional homes, can indeed raise kids who are capable of murder.  Yet all I have heard about these kids is how nice they were and how something else is to blame for their unspeakable acts of evil. 

He doesn’t have to be the kid of a crack-drowned prostitute, with an unknown dad, living in public housing.

Maybe at the end of all the socio-psycho examination into the problem of gun violence someone will figure out that without the gun, there is no gun violence.
Sure it may involve knives, fists, sticks or stones, but the magnitude of the
damage will be minimal.  Also maybe they will realize the problems of white
kids in the country aren’t much different than kids of color in the cities. 
They are all looking for love, guidance, discipline – and they depend on us,
the grown ups, to keep them safe.