Violence and Innocent Children

Every mass shooting leaves me sad--but also frustrated.  I recall when my first book appeared, a history of violence against wives, nearly twenty years ago, and I was trying with very little success to interest Portland radio stations in it.  KBOO did an hour-long interview, but the leading AM station said that they weren't interested until something newsworthy happened.  Finally the day came when a husband kidnapped a child rather than simply beating up his wife.  This was news.  But shortly before the interview was to commence a large passenger plane crashed and killed many people.  As an airline crash trumped a child kidnapping every day of the week, my ten minutes of fame was reduced to "can you sum up your book in a single sentence?"  I replied, with a touch of sarcasm, that the book argued that violence against wives should be understood as an ongoing process, not peculiar events.  I might have added that many more people are killed in automobile accidents than in airplane crashes, but I was out of time.

Of course twenty-seven people--most of them young children--being killed in a single event is tragic.  But I'm not convinced that it should become the prime driver of policy and legislation.  A few commentators have pointed out the neglected fact that homicides in the U.S. have been in steady decline in recent years.  So maybe the nation is not going to hell in a hand basket.  School shootings remain extremely rare.  Do we want to take money away from teachers so that every school has armed guards?  And in talking about the pros and cons of controlling guns or disseminating them more widely, shouldn't we be studying subjects such as the likelihood of accidental shootings, events that are so common as to be unremarkable and therefore not newsworthy?

I also wonder why we don't pay more attention to the deaths of innocent children that are relatively easy to prevent.  Few of us realize that our tax dollars are funding drone attacks that have killed scores of innocent children.  Thousands of children perish every day across the globe for lack of food and simple medicines.  Even right here in the U.S.A. millions of children's lives are endangered by problems such as poverty, malnutrition, obesity, and environmental health hazards that we lack the political will to address.

There is a lot that we can't do--or at least can't easily do.  But when it comes to saving innocent children, there is also a lot of "low-hanging fruit."