“Teach Your Children Well”
A Grandmother’s Thoughts on the Wolves Inside Us
Our Canadian-born granddaughter, who now lives in the United States with her Canadian mother and American stepfather, was required to go for a medical check-up in her eighth year.
This check-up included weighing and measuring and calibration of percentiles relative to her age group, plus some questions. Two of the doctor’s questions shocked us.
He asked her if there were firearms in her home and, if there were, were they locked up? Our granddaughter told him that there were no firearms in her home and added that she felt very sad about the kids killed in Nashville.
Her doctor’s appointment was only a few days after the tragic shooting at Covenant School (March 27, 2023) so should we have been shocked by the doctor’s question, or about our granddaughter’s awareness of the most recent school shooting? Perhaps not, but what was most shocking to us is that these questions appear to have become necessary information for American doctors.
I needed to know more.
After some research, I discovered that pediatric associations in both the U.S. and Canada do recommend that doctors ask these questions. This is the recommendation because the availability of firearms is an important factor in adolescent suicide, homicide, unintentional firearm deaths and school shootings. Doctors need to know so that parents can be warned about the risks.
But isn’t an eight-year-old too young to be answering these kinds of questions?
No, not really considering what seems to be the ever-escalating incidence of gun violence. A six-year-old student in Virginia intentionally shot his teacher. The key word in the previous sentence is intentionally. This was no accident.
In Edmonton, Alberta a depressed 16-year-old shot and killed two police officers and seriously wounded his mother who was trying to take the gun out of his hand.
I am a retired teacher-librarian, and grandparent who struggles to understand gun violence. How had we gotten here? I needed more context, more facts that might help me deal with this reality … at least intellectually, if not emotionally. My focus was on the United States because I did not know enough about the evolution of their gun violence crisis.
First stop, the oft mentioned Second Amendment of the American constitution, which dates to 1791. Who better to comment on this than former Attorney Generals. In a 1992 opinion piece in the Washington Post, six former American attorney generals wrote:
“For more than 200 years, the federal courts have unanimously determined that the Second Amendment concerns only the arming of the people in service to an organized state militia; it does not guarantee immediate access to guns for private purposes. The nation can no longer afford to let the gun lobby’s distortion of the Constitution cripple every reasonable attempt to implement an effective national policy toward guns and crime.”
Unfortunately, in 2008, a Supreme Court case (in a narrow 5-4 vote) ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home. This ruling helped to open the floodgates, emboldening more and more Americans to bring guns into their homes.
Something tells me that the founding fathers would be appalled by the ruling, which is a distortion of their intention, and by the carnage that is now taking place in their beloved country.
The facts are shocking. Guns are now the leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 18. Each day 12 children die from gun violence in the United States. Another 32 are shot and injured. An estimated 4.6 million American children live in a home where at least one gun is kept loaded and unlocked. These improperly stored weapons have contributed to school shootings, suicides, and the deaths of family members, including infants and toddlers.
https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/blog/gun-violence/facts-about-gun-violence-and-school-shootings/
In 2018, Amnesty International published a report called In the Line of Fire – Human Rights and the U.S. Gun Violence Crisis. The authors made the following conclusion:
“In the face of clear evidence of persistent firearm violence, high rates of gun ownership, and ease of access to firearms by individuals likely to misuse them, the USA is failing to meet its obligation to protect and promote human rights pursuant to international law.”https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AMR5195482018ENGLISH.pdf
The tragic irony of this situation is that year after year polls show that most Americans support stricter gun control laws. Non-profit groups have been formed by students and parents, and there is now a National Gun Violence Survivors Week every February. Why February?
“With a gun death rate 13 times greater than other high-income nations, by early February, more people are killed with guns in the United States than are killed in our peer countries in an entire year.” https://momentsthatsurvive.org/about/
Thinking about these sad facts took me back to the words of a Graham Nash song called “Teach Your Children Well,” that was released in1970 by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.”
With the first two lines of this song listeners receive a critical message.
“You who are on the road
Must have a code- that you can live by.”
Later Nash saw a haunting photograph taken by Diane Arbus in the early 1960s that matched what he was trying to say in his song.
“One day, in a San Francisco gallery, I came upon an image that would stay with me forever. It was Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. and it was taken by Diane Arbus in the early ’60s. While standing before this masterpiece, I realized that the sensibilities I was reacting to perfectly matched my new song. I understood that if we didn’t teach our children a better way of dealing with our fellow human beings then the very future of humanity was in dire straits …
Diane’s image makes me realize that we have to do better, as parents, to raise our kids in a more affectionate way. We must help them deal with their lives, their friends, and their fellow human beings in a much more compassionate manner because violence is not the way to deal with our differences.”
The young boy captured in this photograph revealed later in his life that his parents had just divorced and that he felt abandoned.
Juxtaposing the song and the photograph gave me some emotional context for my despair over the tragic gun violence statistics. As adults, we need to do our best for children. They need to know what our code to live by is and that this code is based on compassion and love. Each child deserves a future that is free from shootings and acts of violence in their schools, homes, and communities.
There is a parable often told to children that tells us about a battle that goes on inside people. This battle is between two wolves. One is a good wolf that represents love, kindness, and truth. The other is a bad wolf that represents hatred, greed, and lies. Which wolf wins the battle? The parable tells us that whichever wolf you feed wins.
For the sake of the children, each of us needs to feed the good wolf, because right now it seems that the bad wolves are winning. What are we doing to keep the bad wolves out of the lives of the children? Are we voting with our hearts and minds? Are we marching, protesting, and petitioning when things are not right?
The children are waiting for us to act.
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Dianne Harke, now retired, taught and worked as a teacher-librarian at several Alberta schools. She has also been a school library consultant for the Saskatoon Board of Education in Saskatchewan and a librarian at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton. A scribbler from a young age, Dianne has had short pieces published in The Edmonton Journal and The Globe and Mail newspapers. Her first book, Incognito – The Astounding Life of Alexandra David-Neel, was published by Sumeru Press in 2016.
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