> Ref: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/05/27news.html
>
> -----
> "First, we kill all the 11-year-olds..."
>
> Meaner than the mean kids who go on shooting sprees are the measures
> adults are pursuing in the name of combating crime -- including proposed
> legislation to execute preteens.
>
> BY ROBIN TEMPLETON | A series of high-profile school-site killings by
> young boys -- including last week's shooting spree in a Springfield,
> Ore., high school cafeteria -- have precipitated a more predictable
> horror: proposed legislation to try 10-year-olds as adults and apply the
> death penalty to 11-year-olds. It is as if a handful of problem
> children -- "mean kids" we call them -- are absolving adults of having
> to deal with the problems of children.
>
> "Current juvenile laws could not have anticipated violent crimes being
> committed by children this young," explains Texas State Rep. Jim Pitts,
> who is sponsoring the latest round of legislation.
>
> But it is Pitts' generation that warrants concern. For the past
> quarter-century, aging baby boomers -- not children or teenagers -- have
> driven the upsurge in violent crime. The FBI reports that arrest rates
> for violent crime have doubled for 30- to 49-year-olds since 1975.
> Homicide by children under 13 occurs less frequently today than in 1965.
The FBI arrest rates only measure an average nationwide. Professor John Lott's
analysis of FBI statistics from 1977 to 1996, which he originally worked on for
a study sponsored by Handguns Control Inc., the primary anti-gun lobbying group
(and which fired him when his conclusions directly contradicted their
predetermined prejudices and propaganda needs), shows that there is a distinct
difference in violent crime statistics between states that have passed
right-to-carry concealed weapons laws, and states that have no-right-to-carry
laws. In his expanded study for his new book: _More Guns, Less Crime_ he
examined stats for all multiple death spree type shootings, and found that the
rates for all such violent crimes have been trending downward, and in states
which pass right-to-carry laws, they will experience an average of almost an 80%
drop in such spree shootings within 5 years of passage of such laws in each
state.
> Texas is not a lone state. Long before Jonesboro, the governors of
> California and New Mexico appealed in the name of victims of juvenile
> crime for laws to lower their states' execution ages to 14 and 13,
> respectively. On state and federal fronts, efforts are proliferating to
> sentence children as adults, abolish the protective segregation of child
> from adult inmates and limit parole for juvenile offenders. New Jersey
> is deploying military-designed satellite technology to track juvenile
> parolees cuffed with 8-pound transmitters. The head of the state's
> Juvenile Justice Commission boasts that the system is like "Star Wars."
Another interesting note is that Prof. Lott found that the death penalty has had
little to no measurable impact on violent crime rates. Hmmmmm....
> In short, the war on crime has become obsessed with young people -- but
> as targets rather than victims, predators rather than prey. Which
> shouldn't surprise young people. After all, children are far more apt to
> be murdered by adults -- including their own parents -- than the other
> way around. "The only time people really pay attention to kids is if we
> pick up a gun and blast somebody," a 16-year-old friend observed a week
> after the schoolyard killings in Jonesboro, Ark. Yet most young people
> are more concerned about missing breakfast than dodging bullets. Some 12
> million children are malnourished in America today, according to the
> Children's Defense Fund. The poverty rate of young people overall is 50
> percent higher today than it was in 1970.
The Children's Defense Fund is one of thos liberal PACs that erroneously
categorize 'children'. While Websters dictionary classifies a 'child' as a
person in a prepubescent state, usually less than 14 years of age, liberal
groups like CDF and HCI, in their propaganda, use stats for people of ages up to
19 and even up to 25 years of age. That teen age girls may be malnourished due
to peer pressure/self discipline or eating disorders associated with peer
pressure is not taken into account in these stats.
> Adults' response to all this would make Charles Dickens shudder: Since
> 1970 we have cut back spending on education by at least 25 percent and
> upped funding for incarceration by $3.2 billion. If the present rate of
> incarceration continues, one out of every 20 children born in 1997 will
> spend time behind bars. For males the figure will be one out of 11, and
> for African-American males it will be one in four.
We have been cutting back on the rate of increase in funding. Actual funding, in
real dollar terms, when adjusted for inflation, has not dropped at all.
Also, what is meant by the term 'time behind bars'? If you call spending a few
hours behind bars while the bureaucracy finally figures out that the bail they
say you are wanted on was actually paid, or that the fine they say you never
paid was actually paid, is actually classifiable as 'hard time' then its obvious
that a propaganda job is going on here. Additionally, at the rate that
government is making more and more daily activities illegal, I can well imagine
that within a few years a majority of the population being members of the
'criminal' class.
> The irony is that the generation of baby boomers backing these policies
> grew up, by and large, distrusting adults. Today it is adults who
> distrust the young. A Rand Corporation survey in 1996 found that
> American adults believe juveniles cause 50 percent of violent crime. The
> FBI, by contrast, reported that year that juveniles caused 10 to 15
> percent of violent crime. Last March -- the same week that media
> headlined the Jonesboro shootings -- the FBI reported a 30 percent drop
> in the juvenile homicide rate over the past three years.
The primary targets in this media campaign are not the children, but gun makers
and dealers. The media ignores that these sort of shootings have been going on
for years at a more or less constant rate. They are publicizing them now because
they are prepping the population to support more gun restriction legislation.
> "I know what World War III will be -- a war against teenagers,"
> predicted Emilio, 17, after watching "Twelve Monkeys," a film about
> postapocalyptic dystopia. According to the National Criminal Justice
> Commission, spending on crime fighting is actually increasing three
> times faster than defense spending. The spectre of 10- and 11-year-olds
> dressed in camouflage, toting rifles as they stalk their peers, serves
> as the new "Red menace" for a prison-industrial complex that is coming
> to rival the military-industrial complex. This time the enemy is among
> us -- our own children.
>
> Wars, of course, can be useful. World War II drafted 10 million American
> men after the Great Depression rendered more than 15 million Americans
> jobless. In deindustrializing economies, prisons convert otherwise
> expendable and potentially subversive residents into raw material and
> profit margins. The war on crime is assimilating young people on the
> margins by criminalizing them largely for nonviolent, economically
> motivated offenses such as drug possession. Three-strikes-you're-out
> laws make it clear that there is no such thing as redemption once you've
> activated the tripwire.
>
> Facing up to Springfield -- or Pearl, Miss., or Memphis or Jonesboro --
> will require acknowledging that children devalue life to the extent that
> the adult world devalues their lives. In towns long considered America's
> heartland, mean children are arming themselves in imitation of adults
> increasingly determined to prove they can be meaner.
> SALON | May 27, 1998
Also, from the amount of time the media focuses on people who use guns to solve
their problems in a wrong manner, some children may be developing the idea that
the world pays attention to people who use guns. Children in todays increasingly
single parent family structures are starved for love and attention, and some
will do anything to get it.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@together.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------ How many fnords did you see before breakfast today?