Some part of the numerous school shootings in the U.S. needs to be tied back to personal and parental responsibility.
I grew up in suburban Long Island near the NYC line. Our public high school -- back in the 70s/80s -- had both a archery and riflery team. Every day (during the season) students would bring their guns and bows into school for practices & competitions against other schools. Our school also had a Junior RTOC program. The NRA every year also sponsored programs from elementary school & up about gun safety.
We never had a problem with students shooting up schools with guns during this time -- even though the 1970s was a fairly active period of civil & racial strife in the U.S. What has changed? What causes students (or recent students) to suddenly start showing up and shooting up schools in the past couple of decades?
Some states (not many) have now realized the connection between school shootings, and violence in their communities is directly related to the irresponsibilities of the parents of those youths.
Further, they understand the increasing connection with minorities working jobs at night or the evenings even on the weekends when there's nobody monitoring the activities of their children while the parents are at work.
Some cities are now trying some extreme measures such as using a curfew for youths that typically say youth can not be outside after 10pm unless they're with an adult.
The few that have done those types of curfews, the shooting was related to a youth being shot or when a youth shot someone in an upscale area or popular tourist area of their city.
There are those that say "curfews" don't work but I would argue that
curfews worked before in the far past of the Mafia/Gangs era during the bootlegging or speakeasy days when crime was skyrocketing back then in major urban communities.
Unfortunately, it didn't work in the 90's when it was tried again because I remember going for late walks with my mom and siblings (young adults) along Lake Shore when I would visit while on leave from the military and then visit while in grad school. I would see a lot of youth walking around, especially on hot nights...
very little police presence.
Fortunately, it was an area with low violence and more upscale.
- Not discussed often enough...crime rises dramatically with increasing weather temperatures in any city in North America.
Regardless, there's in fact a connection between violence and parents not monitoring their youths in the evening and/or late at night especially today with more parents working jobs that are typically
not 8am to 5pm along with the fact there's an increasing number of parents working on the weekends...
Simply, more youths are not being supervised that has a correlation with more violent crimes by youths regardless if its at night or during the day.
wrbtrader