Some Thoughts On “Fixing” Gun Policy
“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.” ~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
How does fixing gun law policy correct the much deeper issue of childhood abuse and neglect? How does that correct the issue that we as a nation maybe failing our children? Consider the following:
“Family court just graduates kids to criminal court,” says Harold Henry, a law school professor who has worked for the federal government. “The [family] court needs some basic reforms. Aside from the day-to-day administration, what we need is a network of service alternatives.
Eighty-five percent of the placements are with private agencies — and there you have the whole problem of refusal. Private agencies want motivated kids. They want people who want to be helped. They don’t want kids who act out. They don’t want kids who are problems. Well, that’s the kind of kids they get in family court. Those parents are not in court voluntarily.
“And then because of city budget priorities — I’d say that’s true in all big cities today — they don’t have the money to do the job.”
“And services are just inadequate. I suppose psychiatric services are one of the biggest problems. Wherever they have them, it’s a service to the judge, not to the defendants. And it takes so long to get even that done, it’s often heartbreaking. Sometimes people have to wait for two weeks while they undergo an examination. In some cities, that process has been speed up. But it’s caused terrible hardship in others.”
“For instance, not too long ago, I saw a mother with six kids who had burned the hand of one of them on the stove. Had it all wrapped up in bandages. It was the second time she’d caught him stealing. Middle-class people like us think that kind of punishment is grotesque. But then a dollar or two is not so critical in our budgets. For the mother it meant eating or not eating.”
“Well, anyway, that’s what her parents had done when she was a kid, so that’s what she did. She’d gone out of the house and the child took her welfare money. I think it was her last three dollars and she just went crazy. So the judge decided to send her to the hospital for psychiatric workup. Her kids were, two, three, four, six, and nine, and eleven. It was the nine year old that stole the money.”
“It’s crazy. That woman didn’t need a psychiatric workup. She needed more money. The kids begged the judge not to put her in the hospital. They couldn’t believe it when he said he’d have to. Well, believe it or not, they ended up in a shelter while she went off for two weeks for a psychiatric examination. I don’t know what happened to her. That kind of psychiatric service is not treatment.”
“I was talking about money. Every city agency is big cities today is competing with every other for a very precious dollar. I don’s see any changes.”
“Of course the whole federal domestic policy is suicide. They just don’t understand that the local level is where the problems are. That’s where they have to be dealt with. On the street level. That’s where it happens, not in some bureaucrat’s office.”
Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, Anthony Spencer, Thomas Ruppert. Ellery Channing. What do they have in common besides murder? The last three were small-time, dime-a-dozen criminals, their lives part of the pattern of big-city violence in the mid-twentieth century.
They were also part of the statistics of the mid-1960s when crime in the United States was increasing in all age groups by some 10.5 percent throughout the country and even more among young age groups. For sixteen- to twenty-year-olds — the Anthony Spencers, the Thomas Rupperts, the Ellery Channings — it was up 11.1 percent.
The records show that as children some of our seven were neglected, some were abandoned, some abused by their parents or caretakers. Most of them spent time, some a lot of time, in the kinds of institutions that are supposed to catch and prevent delinquent and/or criminal behavior, or to “rehabilitate” or help children with sever problems. Most of them were seen at least once by psychiatrists. None were helped. They all came out worse than when they went in.
The records of all but Whitman show that as children they needed help desperately and didn’t get it. Institutionalized for varying lengths of time, they fell through the cracks in our child-saving institutions, and many other people died because of it. Their stories are monuments to parental and social neglect, and the failure of the public correctional system.
Men, Masculinities, and Murder-Suicide
Other Sources: Feigelson-Chase, Naomi, A Child Is Being Beaten; Violence against children an American tragedy, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1975).
ON FINDING TRUTH. . . . “One of the most effective tools for cooperation was, and remains, speech. What form of early human was the first to attempt speech as we know it today — words and sentences expressing thoughts about the past and the future as well as communication about the present — we do not know. Our primate ancestors, of course, were capable of communicating with each other, as primates are today, with vocalizations, grunts, and wordless shouts meaning “Get out of my way,” or “Here comes something!” And until very recently it was believed that these creatures were unable to develop speech because of their limited brain power. More recently it has been suggested that a more likely explanation is their lack of the proper physical arrangements in the throat, mainly the tongue and the pharynx, to make the sounds necessary for speech.” ~Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression View all posts by proclivitiesprinciplewisdom
Published April 14, 2018
Originally published at proclivitiesprinciplewisdom.wordpress.com on April 14, 2018.
