Why so much violence??

I, like you am horrified at the news of another tragic school shooting. How many children must we lose before we get serious in our search for a cause and a cure for this deadly scourge?I am a Public Health professional and have spent the last 30 years assisting in the design and analysis of research which seek to identify causes and cures for disease.

Since the latest school shooting, I have been searching the thousands of written words and hours of TV news and commentary, with little success, for any hint of support for my hypothesis on why we are experiencing these horrendous acts of public violence by our youth.

Consider this:We send our children to school where they are exposed to math, and we confidently expect they will learn math.At school our children are exposed to reading and we expect they will learn to read.We expose our children to science, logically expecting they will learn science.And we expose our children to a steady diet of violence and illogically expect a different outcome.Movies and TV portray violence hour after hour. And most often violence is portrayed as the appropriate and effective reaction to every real and imagined hurt. We are creating a society of violence.Thousands of video games glorify violence.A child can blow away a hundred people between supper and bed time. Then go safely to sleep, and all is well in the morning.And we are surprised when the result is violence?

Any observant parent can tell you when watching their children at play that there is a fuzzy line between fantasy and reality, and unfortunately there are a lot of emotionally and mentally handicapted adults that suffer that same challenge.

A wise man once said: “as a person thinks in his heart so is he”. 

My daughter, who is a Special Education teacher told me that a parent came to see her about the progress of her child. The parent said that she promised her child that if she learned to count to 10, She would buy her Grand theft Auto.

 70 years ago Dr. Theodore Woodward at the University of Maryland School of Medicine cautioned his interns: “when you hear hoof beats in the street, look for horses, not Zebras” In seeking a solution to this evil of violence, why don’t we start with the obvious?

Floyd Petersen, MPH  909-796-7440 (H), 909-754-4700 (C)

Assistant Professor (Bio statistics, Epidemiology) Retired

Loma Linda University