Shooting at Santa Fe School, Texas

When I read the sad reports of shooting by a gun-toting student at Santa Fe High School on May 19th 2018, killing 10 and injuring another 10, my mind revolted at this mindless violence exhibited by a student at his own school. US reports say it is the 22nd US School shooting since the beginning of this year and we are only in May of 2018!

I love watching Cowboy movies since my childhood and thoroughly enjoyed the scenes of horse-riding cowboys, guns strapped to their holsters and the quickness of eye and finger surprising opponents. But, that was Wild West of earlier centuries and even then there was the Sheriff, often at the expense of his own life, enforcing law & order and hanging the bad and ugly!

Come on, Texas people should sit up seriously and analyse what is going wrong with their kids. We cannot blame the violence on the streak of DNA that has travelled in the blood stream from those bygone days. We have to control this freak runaway gene from killing the innocent school children by psychologically unstable gun-men, here in this case a suspect student of the same school, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17.

When I was studying for my Masters of Public Administration in the US, I was advised by the Security Department advisory not to enter some parts of the city and by  a well-wisher, that I should not be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, how can you ensure that. Two people of the same Sante Fe School were definitely at the wrong place at the wrong time; a Pakistani exchange student, Sabika Sheikh, who was killed, and , Substitute teacher Cynthia Tisdale who was also killed.

But, Nature had its surprise as well when a student who survived being shot in the head tweeted: “I’m so grateful and blessed that god spared me today.” Rome Shubert showed, where a bullet went in the back of his head and came out near his left ear. So, God saved him despite being shot.

“Tears of sadness, anger and pain”, are definitely appreciated as a sentiment, but some serious thought deserves to be given by the great American people on the easy availability of firearms in society and their still easier accessibility within at homes by children. I have earlier given a detailed thought in my Blog on the same site to this issue. I think it deserves to be looked at.

Two links are given below:

Shooting at The Strip by Sandeep Silas

Texas: Why Shoot Churchgoers? by Sandeep Silas

Books, must return to the children as a habit, who are today overtaken by internet and other social media. During our childhood in India, we had no mobile phones, no internet, no Television, no such thing as alternate social media. Only the radio reached us and delighted us with songs, stories, and informed us wit news. Newspapers, magazines and books were our window to the world.

We saw, travelled, understood different cultures, lived the lives of the characters we found in the books. And our world was peaceful. None of us ever suffered from an impulse of using a gun in school, which if present at home, was a licensed weapon and kept under lock and key, handled only by father during his hunts.

A little amount of control is necessary. I know after a certain age in America the child cannot even be reprimanded by parents, but, gathers life impressions from the world around him or her. Wonderful, but it is like living a little on the edge. I feel that the social impressions, bonds of family and voluntary organisations should be so strongly knit around the children that the basic core values of every American child drive him or her towards peace and camaraderie. Guns are neither playthings nor the solution to any problem, personal or societal,  otherwise we would have decimated our own people very fast in every country.

Anywhere a child dies, humanity dies a hundred deaths!

Let us work for bringing more peace within us!