One of my students recently wrote a research paper arguing that corporal punishment should be banned in our country. I was familiar with his compelling arguments. Other students have made the same argument and backed it up with overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is ineffective in changing behavior, can cause lifelong emotional damage, and inevitably sends the wrong message: I [parent] am bigger and older, and therefore I have a right and obligation to beat you for failing to behave the way I want you to: Spare the rod and spoil the child. It is from Proverbs, but might better be accepted as a metaphor for discipline rather than a literal injunction to beat children with a stick as proof of love. Research does not support the practice.
Over the years, this issue of physical punishment of children has come up again and again in my classes. We talked about it when we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and when we read Their Eyes Were Watching God. Students who have been hit or spanked almost invariably defend the practice as necessary to instilling respect, morality, and proper behavior in a child. Almost invariably, these are students who struggle with those behaviors. Their defense of corporal punishment also ignores classmates who are models of respectful, moral, and consistently appropriate behavior—students who were never spanked at all, but received consistent and gentle guidance.
Each side of this debate is surprised to hear from the other. Some have faith in violence as necessary to righteousness; others recognize violence as a questionable last-resort response.
Increasingly, the United States is isolated from other first world nations which do not allow corporal punishment of children or prisoners and which have outlawed the death penalty. We kill and hit because we believe it this is the only right, fair, and effective thing to do. We believe it is necessary.
We are wrong.
We are the only nation in the world that routinely sees school children shot dead in public schools. A recent study reveals that since the infamous shootings at Columbine in 1999, 270 American schools have suffered shootings. Thousands of children were witness to that violence. Imagine children growing up and perhaps growing old with the images of dead and dying classmates, blood on the floor of their classrooms, and politicians who claim their hearts bleed but do nothing to stop it.
It does not happen elsewhere in the world. Australia had a mass shooting, changed their laws, and has not suffered another. Australians are not better people than Americans—no, I do not accept that. Canadians own guns too. The Swiss require military training of all male citizens. Many countries lionize violent sport. (Watch a rugby match and come back to argue that football is more violent.)
Our video games are violent, but that is a reflection of our national love of violence, our belief that violence is the ultimate adjudicator of righteousness.
I have come to understand that it is not guns, but our determination that they are necessary. It is a paradox: True, guns do not kill people, people do, but our sick need for guns makes us the sort of people who use guns to kill. It is not that we are inherently violent people that is killing, but our conviction that violence is effective.
Americans believe that violence solves everything: crime, childhood foolishness, boredom, loneliness, illness, heartache.
Americans are not bad people. Our laws, however, seem to insist that the proper response to a man with a knife is another man with a gun, that the response to a man with a gun is more men with guns. We are afraid and our fear makes us dangerous. (A student once told me that being armed was the only way he felt safe. With youth and nearing a foot over me, I still confessed to him that he being armed did not make me feel safe. He was deeply offended.) We have many guns in our country, mostly in the hands of a fraction of our population—and it is a fraction of that fraction who are so fearful walking about in broad daylight that they must always be armed, have a stockpile of military-style weapons hidden at home, and enough ammo to execute an entire neighborhood.
It is a critical misunderstanding to conflate hunters who walk into a forest, get their deer, and walk it back out, skin and dress and stash it in their freezer, with those men who must own an AR-15 in order to feel themselves as safe and whole men.
That frantic need for gun ownership, too often, is cowardice. A couple of years ago, two men stalked back and forth across the street from a Portland elementary school with open carry, causing the entire school to go into lockdown. These men were not supporting the need for a “well regulated militia” but revealing their own fear, disguised as pointless bravado. They were so frightened themselves, they wanted the rest of us to feel fear too. The Second Amendment does not guarantee me access to every sort of weapon, and our founders could not have envisioned how military hardware would have evolved. We do not have well-regulated militias any more. We have the most powerful military in the world.
I have often been frightened alone in the dark. I have never been armed. I have never been so frightened that I wished I could shoot someone. I have never wanted that on my conscience.
What do the school killers have in common? (Research is actually forbidden.) They are mostly frightened, unhappy, but perfectly sane white boys with access to weapons that no responsible person should keep in their home. They also believe they can solve their personal grudges and frustrations with a gun. Because violence can solve anything.
They are wrong.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 