Older people do not understand dangers of guns in classrooms
If you are around 40 years old or older, you never had to worry about a person with a gun coming into your classroom, while you were learning math, trying to kill you.
You didn’t have to worry about a fellow student, coming into the cafeteria, and shooting at you and your friends while you were eating lunch.
You didn’t have to worry about automatic gunfire while you were in the library checking out a book.
And this disconnect, this inability to understand, is what is killing kids every year in America today.
Until you realize that we are all putting every child in harms way because we are incapable of enacting responsible gun laws across the country, so that everyone is on the same page … children will continue to be murdered.
You don’t have to worry about yourself, and that is a big part of the problem.
Arm the teachers and America will become the first country to have “friendly fire casualties” in a school. Because if heavily trained soldiers kill each other by accident, what do you think is gonna happen when you send your child into a classroom that already has gun in there, on a person trained in math?
Dennis Chaquette, Keaau
Appreciate response to ‘Bikes on Rice’
I’m Jim Benkert, the event coordinator of Bikes on Rice. I am also a Lihue home owner.
I am thrilled at the response to our first Bikes on Rice event, and would like to welcome everyone to participate in our future rides on the second Tuesday of the month, starting at the Lihue Civic Center.
Our mission in the Bikes on Rice undertaking has several facets. It’s a great physical activity. Its also a great way to meet our neighbors and see the surrounding areas. It saves on fuel, and we all know how automobile congested Kauai has become, with no solution in sight.
One of our primary objectives with Bikes on Rice is to promote safe and enjoyable cycling in and around the Lihue core.
As an avid cyclist, it excites me to see the acceptance of the Kapaa coastal path as a true multi-use paved trail. Whether riding beach bikes, strollers, rollerblading, dog walking or just couples walking and enjoying the ocean scenery, its a true jewel in the crown for our island. When the path is completed I’m sure I’ll be biking to Kapaa instead of driving the highway gauntlet.
With the Bikes on Rice rides, we would like to encourage safe bicycle access to the thriving Rice Street business district. Our rides start and end at the Civic Center on Rice Street, but venture out onto many local streets and surrounding neighborhoods.
We are teaching our participants skills that will promote safe integration with automobile traffic. We search for the best places to access the busy areas. We train our leaders in cycling laws, safety and road-etiquette. We believe that with more awareness and expectation of all traffic; motorized vehicles, pedestrians and bikes, it will be a much safer environment.
As a Lihue resident, I would love to ride my bike downtown, maybe run a few errands, such as to the post office or shopping, then stop in for a bite to eat at one of our wonderful local restaurants.
We are thankful that our mission has been so well received and met with the aloha of Kauai and Lihue, and we thank the local people and businesses for making it possible. Come on out for our next easy ride and see what it’s all about!
Jim Benkert, Lihue
Dennis, …each generation has its own issues, problems, and concerns. I could appeal to your critical thinking and basic reasoning, but most of what you wrote is emotion and feelings.
I didn’t worry about someone shooting me in elementary school, Junior High School, or High School. True.
Feelings and emotions aside, and I will not bore you with statistics, but 40,000 people die each year in the US while driving on our roads. Why does that not concern you? 11 teenagers die on the road each day DUE TO TEXTING while driving. Odds of a mass shooting happening at your Child’s school are about the same as being struck by lightning.
I worry about the things that have a probability of happening on a daily basis. Right now, driving a car is the the most dangerous thing I worry about for myself and my family. Automobile safety is a joke in this country.
Younger people do not understand the dangers of an unarmed citizenry and a powerful central governemnt
Yeah, one day we might have an unhinged buffoon take over……….Oh, wait.!!!
Arm the teachers. It will be way more exciting to watch about school shootings in the news!
Dennis:
Just why do you think it is that there was little violence in school for us older people? It absolutely was not that guns weren’t available. Heck, the Sears-Roebuck catalog had over 50 pages of rifles, shotguns and handguns that could be mail ordered. And Lihue Store carried plenty of them that could be purchase with no applications or background checks. I grew up here and went to school with my BB gun and pellet gun…as did some of my friends. We’d drop them off at the principals office and pick them up after school. I had access to my father’s rifles and handguns…yet oddly all through my years I never once thought about shooting anyone.
You see Dennis, I and every friend I had, was drilled by parents, grandparents and our friends’ parents about MORAL & responsible behavior. Good morals dictate that one does no harm to others and only resorts to violence in self-defense or to protect family and the innocent. Teaching traditional morals has been demonized and abandoned; we are now paying the price of kids with no self-control or moral perspective. Evil reigns.
Your solution is to condemn the inanimate object rather than the evil-doer…guns in this case. Do you blame forks for obesity or pens for pitiful spelling and grammar? Do you know that three times as many people are killed by knives as with guns? Are we to ban them or require a mental health certificate for their purchase.
Listening to people like you it seems the best approach is to abandon the kids in school by leaving them unprotected in gun free zones (every evil person knows schools are free fire zones).
RG DeSoto
“These kids today !!!” “Hey you, get off my lawn !!!” “Why, when I was a kid………!!!”
Talk about pitiful
Aloha, We have to pass through a metal detector to enter the airports, and some countries when you enter shopping centers you pass through a metal detector and undergo a light pat-down and all bags and back packs are opened and serched.
Have we come to that…?
Maybe…!
Mahalo,
Charles
I am glad that so many find school safety worth discussing. However, lumping all “people over 40” as not understanding the issue of violence is as fraught with hazard as saying, “All you young people think…..” Our inability to completely solve a problem should not keep us from trying to do better. In the late 1990s, 55,000 people a year were killed in drunk driving crashes. After years of public education, starting with a consistent message to school children, and tighter dram shop and drunk driving laws, far fewer people die each year. It is possible to chip away at death caused by gun violence in schools. How many children’s lives do we think would make an effort worthwhile?