What About Our Daughters discusses Chicago school violence

An insightful post and she sums up the violence that has claimed the lives of 20 CPS students...

With all due respect. I am sorry, this ain't a purely gun violence issue to me. Sure guns make it easier, but it ignores the fact that in many rural parts of the nation the every single person in the house has a gun- including the toddlers. You would be surprised by how many suburban homes have ARSENALS in them or the number of lawyers and doctors with guns. Yet you don't hear stories of massive numbers of individual killings of school students via gun violence. To blame the guns without doing an additional examination of the culture of violence does not go far enough, but I can understand the need to blame something and it is easier to blame the gun vs. the shooters.

I can assure you that in other countries, like Rwanda, they managed to kill plenty of folks with machetes. Sure guns take a human life in a split second, but I think it is deeper than that. A fundamental disregard for human life. Aggression and violence in children. I think contributed to by the culture, but also I think a response to growing up in an environment where they just don't feel safe, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally and I point directly at the destruction of family in this country.

It isn't that Mama and Daddy aren't marrying their kids, but they also aren't married or committed to their children and it goes beyond the parents, but the loss of the safety net of the extended family as well. You can take away all the bullets in the world, but if you are growing up seeing mama get beat up, or not knowing where the next meal is coming from or bombarded by the message that opulence equals worthiness and you have to get rich or die trying, I can expect one of the responses might be to make sure that that victim hood and abject poverty never happens to you. By any means necessary. Some people work their butts off to get out of the hood through education, military service or just moving away. Other people, increasingly more young people are making another choice, including a life of illicit crime and arming themselves to the tee with whatever you can get your hands on a gun, a machete, or in the case of some third graders in Georgia, a paperweight and a steak knife ...

So there's a lot more to solving this problem than engaging in the all too often very easy answer of calling for more gun control or stricter gun laws. How do we make our children safer and the parents of these young people committing these gun crimes accountable? This is something that is worth rolling up the sleeves, not merely offering all too simple solutions that still doesn't solve the problem.