The Roll-Call of the Deaths at School...

[David Campbell]

The Roll-Call of the Deaths at School…

© David Campbell 19/02/18

The roll-call of the deaths at school
keeps mounting year by year,
with parents left to wonder who’ll
be next to shed a tear
when lock-downs, guards, and all those drills
still leave more dead behind,
while Donald Trump insists what kills
is someone’s troubled mind.

America is sick at heart,
a nation racked by shame
as politicians play their part
by laying all the blame
on this, and that, and these, and those
(but not the NRA),
though they could fix it if they chose —
just take the guns away!

But they won’t do it, they’re afraid
the NRA will block
the many millions they get paid
to overcome the shock
with empty talk of “thoughts and prayers”,
while people wonder why
it seems that no-one really cares
as yet more children die.

[Stephen Whiteside]

Yes, it is a sickening situation. Perhaps the Stoneman Douglas students will be able to achieve what their parents and their generation failed to do.

[Shelley Hansen]

Very sobering poem in response to such a sad situation, David.

[Catherine Lee]

This says it all David... sick at heart indeed - how many deaths will it take?!

[Neville Briggs]

It is classic scapegoating, lay all the sins on the scapegoat ( the gun ) and send it off into the wilderness to perish and the people will have peace.
The violence in the heart of man still remains, the sacrificial goat will not remove it.

[David Campbell]

A strange comment in the circumstances, Neville. Care to elaborate? For example, what would you say to the children, in particular the survivors, who are now agitating for some form of gun control? "Don't bother trying to do anything...that's just the way it is."

David

[Maureen K Clifford]

Good one David and nicely executed as well - but there is movement over there, the young ones are not prepared to be sacrificed by the whim of their elders and their love for firearms. Sanity may yet prevail.

[Neville Briggs]

David, I think some sort of gun control is a good move in a civil society.
The availability of military style weapons to private owners doesn't seem to be a safe situation.

But I was reflecting on, how there have been several mass killings carried out by motor vehicles not guns , should we take away motor vehicles.
Is the problem , the means of violence or the fact of violence as a preferred solution for "wrongs".

Have a look at popular media such as movies and what do we find. Violence as a solution.
Movie viewers are taught that violence and revenge are OK as long as the perpetrator is a person convinced of their righteous cause. The " super heroes " are supposed to be a paragons of justice yet they habitually win by using more savage violence than their opponents. Yes, these are fiction, but the line between fiction and reality can become thin for some disturbed people raging for correction of some real or imagined injustice.
I am becoming more and more convinced that violence as entertainment has more to shape these killing tragedies than availability of any specific type of weapon.
I wonder if the producers of Rambo, Superman, Batman , Die Hard and various computer "games" might feel just a twinge of responsibility for forming dangerous minds.

The violent deaths of young school children is a horrible tragedy, but I did wonder if those who stridently protest about a gun crime against children, think of the 3000+ unborn children killed every week in the US.

Just my rambling thoughts on a different angle to things. Maybe we should write poems holding up the mirror to ourselves to show that our addiction to violence is "the problem".
And of course I applaud your effort to write on the theme of violence , I have thought to do something but my ability to versify is not working well these days.

[Terry]

Very well put Neville
No one of course argues that getting rid of guns wouldn't be a good start - it's helped in Australia.
Mind you the few blokes I know, that I might describe as a bit crazy, all seem to have guns somehow.

Perhaps getting rid of religion should be considered as well, thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered every year in the name of religion, and have been for centuries - but it seems that's ok. - so let's not talk about that.

Terry

[David Campbell]

You’re on very shaky ground with those analogies, Neville. It all comes down to a single word…“intent”. Guns have one primary purpose, namely they’re designed to kill, and all the modifications to them over the years have been aimed at enabling them to do that more efficiently. They are weapons, first and foremost, and any other uses (such as recreational skeet shooting) are purely incidental.

Cars are designed to transport people from A to B. Yes, we have recently seen some mass killings where vehicles were used as weapons, but killing is not their primary function. Car manufacturers have tried to save lives with modifications (seat belts, airbags, better braking systems etc etc.). Gun manufacturers, on the other hand, have only made guns more lethal and, in the US, resisted any attempts to make them less accessible to the general public. They do that through the NRA, which is simply a front for the weapons business. All that malarkey about freedom and the second amendment (which was written when single-shot muskets were the weapon of choice) covers up the fact that it’s a money-making exercise.

Movies are an entertainment. They’re not made to incite aggression. Yes, violence is often graphic, and revenge is a common theme, so it’s possible that screen violence could have an influence on some individuals. But we see the same movies here as they do in the US. What’s the difference? We don’t have the same easy access to guns.

And as for the abortion argument, you’re trying to equate someone buying a gun and killing 17 children at random to a medical procedure which is undertaken legally (in Australia, anyway) for a huge number of personal reasons which don’t need to be detailed here. Suffice to say that there might well be a woman reading this thread who has had an abortion and mightn’t take too kindly to seeing a highly emotional decision which she made referred to in the same context as a mentally disturbed man running amok with a semi-automatic rifle.

If you’re saying that violence is a natural feature of the human race, you’re right. It always has been, long before films or cars or guns existed. We’ve always fought with each other. What’s different now in America is the possibility for a single member of the public to slaughter a lot of people very quickly with a readily-available assault rifle in a society where too many people have an absolute obsession with an out-of-date law. More Americans (1.5 million) have been killed in gun-related incidents in the last 50 years than in all the wars in US history (1.2 million). There’s a statistic worth thinking about. And yes, Terry, religion in its many varieties also has a lot of blood on its hands, but I guess that most religions would insist that their “unique” brand wasn’t created specifically to promote the killing of non-believers.

David