My husband has this on his Thinks Happen page today:
The site of the shooting is literally just around the corner from where we live. It's a very quiet neighbourhood, right on the edge of a quiet Oklahoma town. The young man murdered was a visiting baseball player from Australia.
NBC report HERE
Report from an Australian newspaper Herald Sun HERE.
What compels young men to act out their apparent disaffection in such violent and pointless ways? According to a piece in the Huffington Post back in April at the time of the Boston Marathon tragedy: as of 2006 in the US boys accounted for 83 percent of arrests for violent crimes. By the age of 17, over a quarter of boys report having carried a handgun. In 2010, there were an estimated 756,000 gang members throughout the country.
Curmudgeonly thoughts lead me along the lines that a mandatory draft into public service of some kind is needed, to try to plant some sense into young heads. Other thoughts remind me that young men from the USA and UK, not far from the age of these youths were fighting and being killed in World War 2, in the hope that their sacrifice would bring about a better world - and this is within my lifetime. What on earth has befallen us?
We seem to be well down a slippery slope towards something I don't even want to contemplate.
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It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps that is true. But often a picture still doesn’t tell the entire story. Sure, here is a small memorial, growing along a main street in a residential area. You’ve seen these before. Someone died here.
He was a visiting Australian athlete, out for his afternoon run. The story so far is that he was shot by three teen age boys who “wanted to see someone die.”
Does this hit you where you live? It is less than a minute from my home.
The site of the shooting is literally just around the corner from where we live. It's a very quiet neighbourhood, right on the edge of a quiet Oklahoma town. The young man murdered was a visiting baseball player from Australia.
NBC report HERE
Report from an Australian newspaper Herald Sun HERE.
What compels young men to act out their apparent disaffection in such violent and pointless ways? According to a piece in the Huffington Post back in April at the time of the Boston Marathon tragedy: as of 2006 in the US boys accounted for 83 percent of arrests for violent crimes. By the age of 17, over a quarter of boys report having carried a handgun. In 2010, there were an estimated 756,000 gang members throughout the country.
Curmudgeonly thoughts lead me along the lines that a mandatory draft into public service of some kind is needed, to try to plant some sense into young heads. Other thoughts remind me that young men from the USA and UK, not far from the age of these youths were fighting and being killed in World War 2, in the hope that their sacrifice would bring about a better world - and this is within my lifetime. What on earth has befallen us?
We seem to be well down a slippery slope towards something I don't even want to contemplate.
