Post by Woody Williams on Oct 19, 2006 14:32:17 GMT -5
You knew it was coming, so here it is.....
Hunting Culture Tied to School Shootings
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - PETA
October 18, 2006
By Paula Moore
The recent string of fatal school shootings has rightly spurred President Bush to action. The Bush administration is hosting a meeting of education and law enforcement officials to search for ways to stem the tide of violence in our schools.
Installing more metal detectors and locking school doors is all well and good, but it’s not enough. Unless our leaders also examine the hunting culture in rural America—where most mass school shootings take place—and its role in these disturbing incidents, little will change.
The facts are still coming in, but we know that Charles Carl Roberts—the 32-year-old man who entered an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., bound 10 young girls with wire and plastic ties, and shot them execution-style—was a hunter.
We know, according to a former neighbor, that Duane Roger Morrison—the 53-year-old man who took six girls hostage at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., sexually assaulted them, then fatally shot one girl before killing himself—spent his free time in the mountains, “firing his guns.” It’s a safe bet he wasn’t shooting at tin cans.
We know that all of the students involved in school shootings in recent years first “practiced” on animals and that many of them were hunters. Remember 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Ark., who in 1998 took the hunting guns belonging to Golden’s grandfather—who had taught Andrew to hunt—and used them to ambush their fellow students, killing four girls and one teacher?
In her 2004 book, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine Newman writes that the young killers “dressed in camouflage clothing, exactly as Andrew did when he went hunting. Andrew’s pulling the fire alarm can be likened to setting a trap and luring the prey into an open area. From across the field, their classmates and teachers seemed less like the human beings they went to school with than like quarry to be killed.”
Not everyone who stalks and kills animals will stalk and kill a human. But every person who picks up a gun, aims it at another living being and fires must deaden a piece of his heart. It’s bad enough when adults are the ones pulling the trigger, but we are turning our children into killers as well.
Yet the Pennsylvania Game Commission announced earlier this year the creation of the Mentored Youth Hunting Program, “to encourage more young people to take up hunting to increase hunter numbers.” Did the commission forget that David Ludwig, who is now serving a life sentence for shooting and killing his 14-year-old girlfriend’s parents in Lititz, Pa., just last November when he was 18, was an avid deer hunter? Photos on Ludwig’s blog showed his grinning face as he disemboweled the bloody deer he had just shot.
In Wisconsin, where 15-year-old Eric Hainstock walked into Weston High School and allegedly shot and killed the school’s principal, legislation was introduced to lower the minimum hunting age from 12 to 8. Thankfully, that bill died in May, with no further action taken.
A 1997 survey conducted by Responsive Management—the same company responsible for a poll that many outdoors columnists have been touting recently, allegedly showing widespread support for hunting (never mind that the number of hunters is steadily declining)—found that the majority of young people have “no interest” in hunting. When asked why, more than half said they “love animals” or “don’t like killing animals.” Perhaps 1997 would have been a good year to eliminate youth hunting.
Children have a natural affinity for animals, yet we hand them guns and teach them to be killers. Can we be surprised then, when troubled children from hunting families pick up hunting weapons and direct that violence at their classmates? Banning hunting is not going to solve all of our problems, but at the very least our leaders need to be discussing the connections between hunting and other forms of violence. Handing an immature 12-year-old a gun and teaching him to kill is folly.
Paula Moore is Senior Writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510;
Hunting Culture Tied to School Shootings
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - PETA
October 18, 2006
By Paula Moore
The recent string of fatal school shootings has rightly spurred President Bush to action. The Bush administration is hosting a meeting of education and law enforcement officials to search for ways to stem the tide of violence in our schools.
Installing more metal detectors and locking school doors is all well and good, but it’s not enough. Unless our leaders also examine the hunting culture in rural America—where most mass school shootings take place—and its role in these disturbing incidents, little will change.
The facts are still coming in, but we know that Charles Carl Roberts—the 32-year-old man who entered an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., bound 10 young girls with wire and plastic ties, and shot them execution-style—was a hunter.
We know, according to a former neighbor, that Duane Roger Morrison—the 53-year-old man who took six girls hostage at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., sexually assaulted them, then fatally shot one girl before killing himself—spent his free time in the mountains, “firing his guns.” It’s a safe bet he wasn’t shooting at tin cans.
We know that all of the students involved in school shootings in recent years first “practiced” on animals and that many of them were hunters. Remember 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Ark., who in 1998 took the hunting guns belonging to Golden’s grandfather—who had taught Andrew to hunt—and used them to ambush their fellow students, killing four girls and one teacher?
In her 2004 book, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine Newman writes that the young killers “dressed in camouflage clothing, exactly as Andrew did when he went hunting. Andrew’s pulling the fire alarm can be likened to setting a trap and luring the prey into an open area. From across the field, their classmates and teachers seemed less like the human beings they went to school with than like quarry to be killed.”
Not everyone who stalks and kills animals will stalk and kill a human. But every person who picks up a gun, aims it at another living being and fires must deaden a piece of his heart. It’s bad enough when adults are the ones pulling the trigger, but we are turning our children into killers as well.
Yet the Pennsylvania Game Commission announced earlier this year the creation of the Mentored Youth Hunting Program, “to encourage more young people to take up hunting to increase hunter numbers.” Did the commission forget that David Ludwig, who is now serving a life sentence for shooting and killing his 14-year-old girlfriend’s parents in Lititz, Pa., just last November when he was 18, was an avid deer hunter? Photos on Ludwig’s blog showed his grinning face as he disemboweled the bloody deer he had just shot.
In Wisconsin, where 15-year-old Eric Hainstock walked into Weston High School and allegedly shot and killed the school’s principal, legislation was introduced to lower the minimum hunting age from 12 to 8. Thankfully, that bill died in May, with no further action taken.
A 1997 survey conducted by Responsive Management—the same company responsible for a poll that many outdoors columnists have been touting recently, allegedly showing widespread support for hunting (never mind that the number of hunters is steadily declining)—found that the majority of young people have “no interest” in hunting. When asked why, more than half said they “love animals” or “don’t like killing animals.” Perhaps 1997 would have been a good year to eliminate youth hunting.
Children have a natural affinity for animals, yet we hand them guns and teach them to be killers. Can we be surprised then, when troubled children from hunting families pick up hunting weapons and direct that violence at their classmates? Banning hunting is not going to solve all of our problems, but at the very least our leaders need to be discussing the connections between hunting and other forms of violence. Handing an immature 12-year-old a gun and teaching him to kill is folly.
Paula Moore is Senior Writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510;
