My thoughts go out to the familes of the children killed today.

[stormlord]

I think all the news reporting does more harm than good.

They focus too much on the negative.

I think this situation is terrible and coats everything in an ugly tar. But I won't let some whacko psychopath take away my hopes for the future. We need to grab hold of those hopes so our children will believe this world is worth living in. By focusing on the negative, we send them the message it ain't worth their time.

Keep believing. Keep living. The dream and the work we put into it is our anchor.

I hope they up gun registration requirements. I know gun owners don't like all of the tape and roadblocks, but we got to stop these people from getting guns. I researched this a year ago or maybe two and what I found was a lot of states are missing the mark by a wide margin. They need to get rolling. I realize we can't stop all shootings because that's impossible, but we're missing a lot of people who shouldn't have guns.

The amount of policing in schools is worrying too. I really don't like it. However, with the school shootings in the past 20 years, I can understand why some districts demand it. The problem is that police really are not teachers. They don't understand kids and are going to treat them in a way that's cold and steely. It's something that could give children the wrong impression. They'll grow up around police and get the notion that they're somehow bad or tainted by something evil. If it's too extreme and police are everywhere, they'll either fully submit their will to authority or they'll probably resist it. Both cases scare the crap out of me.

We trade freedom for security and vice-versa. There's an inbetween we need to "shoot" for. With freedom comes responsibility. I'd hope we focus on that more than the reverse: guns, detectors and police. Just think of Afghanistan and the people that grew up during the war. I don't think it's comfortable to grow up feeling like you're hunted or suspected of something wrong. We HAD to be in Afghanistan to smoke out the Taliban and stabilize it against terrorism, but if we had to do the same thing in our schools, I'd fear for our future. Because if children feel like they're hunted or oppressed or chained down, how're they going to grow up?

Responsibility. We need to focus on that if we want to maintain freedom. This also means we must have some measure of respect for our kids and trust that they can learn some things on their own.

But honestly, something tells me people will react by turning to the police. It's just the convenient natural response, instead of taking part of the blame and digging deeper and overhauling the system. This is one reason government keeps getting bigger. People are surrendering more of their will to authority.

Can't fix dumb nor instinct, but you can sometimes fix incompetence.