Thursday, August 28, 2014

It is completely bizarre for the professionals in the USA to seek answers for violence among our young people only to have it destroyed by profiteers.

  1. Firing a gun is not a religious directive. I think most every American would agree with that, although the political right wing and the NRA would like it to be a religious edict.
In the Middle East the USA has made investments with countries such as Saudi Arabia to help rehab madrasas (click here) after 911. Yet within the borders of the USA there are absolutely no guidelines for children and violence while profiteers crank out violence into their lives.
  1. Developmental trajectories toward violence in middle childhood: Course, demographic differences, and response to school-based intervention.
    Aber, J. Lawrence; Brown, Joshua L.; Jones, Stephanie M.
    Developmental Psychology, Vol 39(2), Mar 2003, 324-348. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.39.2.324
  2. Investigated (a) (click here) the course of developmental trajectories toward violence over middle childhood, (b) whether and how the course of these trajectories differed by demographic subgroups of children, and (c) how responsive these trajectories were to a universal, school-based preventive intervention. Four waves of data on features of children's social-emotional development known to forecast aggression/violence were collected over 2 yrs for a highly representative sample of 1st to 6th grade children from New York City public elementary schools (N=11,160). Using hierarchical linear modeling techniques, synthetic growth curves were estimated for the entire sample and were conditioned on child demographic characteristics (gender, family economic resources, race/ethnicity) and amount of exposure to components of the preventive intervention. Three patterns of growth--positive linear, late acceleration, and gradual deceleration--characterized the children's trajectories, and these trajectories varied meaningfully by child demographic characteristics. Children whose teachers taught a high number of lessons in the conflict resolution curriculum demonstrated positive changes in their social-emotional developmental trajectories and deflections from a path toward future aggression and violence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
If the USA can stand in judgement of Middle East madrasas while allowing it's children to be exposed to the same violence, but, this time for profit; who indeed has the real problem?

August 28, 2014
By News 21
For every U.S. soldier (click here) killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America.
More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten.
Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car....

...“It’s an unacceptable number and it should be regardless of where you stand on gun-owning ideology,” said Colette Martin, a member of Parents Against Gun Violence. “The numbers are that high and we are as a country ignoring them.”...

The answer to protecting our children and our society from this level of gun violence is not about teaching them how to shoot a gun; it is preventing them from being exposed to the availability of guns and commercial exploitation of them and their parents.

In the case of Sandy Hook, a young man with emotional problems found his only reward in violence. He became an expert when he believed he was not an expert in anything else. He and his late mother were victims of politicized violence in our society. He should have never been exposed to violence and the potential to allow it into the lives of 26 families. 

This country allowed Adam Lanza and his mother to make very bad choices for the sake of profits to gun manufacturers. What occurred in Arizona with a nine year old child is simply more of the same.