Sometimes you have to give kids credit, sometimes they come up with really insightful things–despite their age. That was the case with Nate Tinbite of Maryland yesterday as he took part in the National Walk Out Day event in Washington, DC. Tinbite told the audience on site and on national television that “My parents never had to worry about someone barging into their classroom with an assault rifle and slaughtering everyone in their class”.
As a 45-year old and someone that would certainly be old enough to be Tinbite’s father I can unequivocally tell you that Nate is 100-percent correct, I never once thought about being shot in school with an assault rifle.
That sense of security came despite the fact that AR-15 rifles were already available for sale in the United States when I was in school. Heck, you could even purchase a full-automatic AK-47 (or a reasonable facsimile) when I was a kid. Those weren’t banned in the US until 1994. That sense of security came despite that fact that there were guns in my house–and likely the houses of most of my classmates. But growing up, I knew that even touching those guns would result in the worst spanking of my life–and being grounded for what would be left of my life. (And by grounded, I mean sent to my room after school and dinner every night where there was no TV, phone, internet, video game system, webcam, or other forms of entertainment. You just sat there and thought about what you had done to deserve this.)
And when I was a kid, even threatening violence against classmates brought swift retribution. School officials would call the police and you would be taken away in a squad car for everyone to witness. Then you would be expelled from school–not sent to the “alternative high school”, not put into a “diversion program”–expelled, with few options for continuing your education. Kids that ‘acted up” weren’t diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and put on behavior-modification drugs to be dispensed at the School Office. You were told to sit in your seat, shut up and pay attention to the teacher–or detention awaited you at the end of the day.
Had there even been school shootings when I was a kid, we would not have heard much about them. There would have been a two minute story on one of the three over-the-air network news broadcasts–and probably a second or third page story in the local newspaper. We would not have seen live footage shot from a helicopter of kids running from the building in terror while reporters tried to guess what was going on. The next 24-hours of television would not have endlessly replayed the video while talking heads argued about it. And security camera footage from inside the school showing the shooter in action would not be posted on the internet for viewing anytime–over and over and over again.
Unfortunately, Nate Tinbite followed his wonderful bit of insight with blame for Congress and the NRA for a lack of gun control measures as the reason his generation has to deal with school shootings. But I’m going to forgive him. He’s young and the society of today is the only one that he has ever known. He doesn’t know what it was like to have parents that actually supervised their children and it wasn’t everyone else’s “fault” when someone would do something bad.
