I’m up just a bit early. I have surveyed the news on the internet (as I always do when rising). The national news is full of articles on the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting. There are details about the shooter, Trump is expressing the opinion that teachers should be armed, students at that high school are demanding changes, and the executive director of the National Rifle Association has claimed Second Amendment rights will be lost.

I’m trying to remember my experiences as a young man in the public-school system of the 1940s and 1950s in my small Oklahoma home town, to connect in my mind that time and those circumstances to the present day. I’m having a very hard time establishing relationships.

Difficulty understanding

The more news articles I read, the more I suspect that present-day culture has passed me by without my recognition. I’ve stepped off the culture bus, it has driven off and has left me walking beside the road. I have difficulty clearly understanding some of among the proposals that I have read:

• Teachers should be armed. This assumes bad guys can be stopped by good guys. Maybe … but all the millions of teachers should be armed, to be sure we don’t have any gaps in the rosters of good guys. However, I’m having a bit of trouble imagining some of my teachers, say our band director (a very retiring fellow) or our history teacher (a 60-year-old woman nearing retirement) packing heat.
• Put armed police officers on campus … as was the armed officer at Parkland.
• Eliminate bump stocks. Of course, automatic weapons like the Thompson submachine gun were prohibited by federal law years ago. What possible reason could an ordinary citizen have for such a device or weapon?
• Raise the age of buying guns. To what age? How old was the Las Vegas shooter?
• Raise the stringency of background checks. Not at all a bad idea, and, assuming availability of comprehensive records (databases) of information about individuals, probably an effective way to identify many of the crazies. We only need to ensure information is directed to data bases and they are screened.

I saw a revealing graphic a few days ago. It plotted the number of firearm-related deaths per million persons as a function of nation. Australia, Japan and New Zealand were near the bottom of the list, as I recall, while the United States was by far the highest number and essentially off the scale compared to other nations. Guess what the difference among the nations was.

Culture is difference

Having no expertise as a sociologist or psychologist, and admittedly not a member of this generation, I can’t speak with authority about modern behavior, but it seems to me that the contemporary American culture is different, somehow, from the culture that I remember growing up. Maybe the difference was small town versus big town, rather than then and now.

However, I think time plays a larger reason in this difference between the people and their behavior I remember versus the people I presently observe and their behavior.

And one more thing: contemporary media is full of reports of shootings. I don’t know how relevant it is or what one does about copycat shootings.

But I’ll make you a bet: Until you screen people carefully, limit ownership of the types of firearms allowed, and take back prohibited types of weapons, we will have much more the same.

James Cafky is a resident of Dededo.