Henry A. Giroux | Killing Children in the Age of Disposability: The Parkland Shooting Was About More Than Gun Violence

An excellent, well articulated, and deeply needed piece 

by Henry Giroux. — Molly

 

People embrace as students return to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday February 28, 2018 in Parkland, Florida. A mass shooting on February 14 at the school left 17 people dead.

By Henry A. Giroux

Donald Trump may have startled Republican lawmakers with his sudden and unexpected support for background checks and other gun control measures, but a closer look at his comments to lawmakers reveals his continued adherence to the core of the pro-gun script that he has been following all along.

At his meeting with lawmakers on February 28 Trump buckled down on the idea that the real problem is the existence of gun-free zones, arguing that eliminating gun-free zones "prevent [mass shootings] from ever happening, because [the shooters] are cowards and they're not going in when they know they're going to come out dead."

The president's repeated efforts to disparage the idea of gun-free zones fit with the earlier call for arming teachers made by Trump and one of his most powerful financial and ideological backers -- the dark knight of gun violence, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Meanwhile, Trump has shown no interest in preventing school shootings by hiring more guidance teachers, support staff and psychologists. Trump's call for a comprehensive gun bill may have made for "captivating" television, but it rattled NRA lobbyists and initiated a tsunami of calls to their allies on Capitol Hill. Nothing surprising to this reaction. It gets worse. Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for the NRA, met with Trump a few days after Trump made his remarks and suggested in a tweet that the president had backed away from his apparent embrace of gun control.

Moreover, there is little confidence following Trump's remarks that Republicans would even remotely endorse legislation for gun control. The NRA "paid $5 million to lobbyists last year" and there is no indication that the time and money spent buying off cowardly politicians will prove ineffectual.

The deeply troubling call for eliminating gun-free zones and arming teachers comes at a time when many schools have already been militarized by the presence of police and the increasing criminalization of student behaviors. Suggesting that teachers be armed and turned into potential instruments of violence extends and normalizes the prison as a model for schools and the increasing expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. What is being left out of this tragedy is that the number of police in schools has doubled in the last decade from 20 percent in 1996 to 43 percent today. Moreover, as more police are put in schools, more and more children are brutalized by them. There is no evidence that putting the police in schools has made them any safer. Instead, more and more young people have criminal records, are being suspended, or expelled from school, all in the name of school safety. As  Sam Sinyangwe, the director of the Mapping Police Violence Project, observes:

The data ... that does exist ... shows that more police in schools leads to more criminalization of students, and especially black and brown students. Every single year, about 70,000 kids are arrested in school.... [Moreover] since 1999, 10,000 additional police officers have been placed at schools, with no impact on violence. Meanwhile, about one million students have been arrested for acts previously punishable by detention or suspension, and black students are three times more likely to be arrested than their white peers.

Trump's proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers' shoulders, foolishly imagining that armed teachers would be able to stop a killer with military grade weapons, and disregarding the risk of teachers shooting other students, staff or faculty in the midst of such a chaotic moment.

In addition, the proposal points to the insidious fact that mass shootings and gun violence have become so normalized in the United States that, as Adam Gopnik points out, "we must now be reassured that, when the person with the AR-15 comes to your kid's school, there's a plan to cope with him." Such statements make visible a society rife with the embrace of force and violence. How else to explain the fact that, at the highest levels of government, horrendous acts of violence, such as mass shootings involving school children, are now discussed in terms of containing their effects rather than eliminating their causes.

Please continue this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43732-killing-children-in-the-age-of-disposability-the-parkland-shooting-was-about-more-than-gun-violence