Children Pay the Price in Minneapolis

 

Just last week, Mad Dog happened to visit the Twin Cities, staying in St. Paul, just across the street from the Children's Hospital, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which is on a hill above the hospital.

Cathedral on a Hill

Today, that hospital, and its sister hospital in Minneapolis, are trying to save children who were shot at their church school.

Mad Dog climbed up that steep hill to the cathedral and sent these photos home to his co conspirator back in Hampton, who remarked, "A simple church to minister to the poor, as Jesus did." 

Well, okay, but it is a beautiful Cathedral, and in a city which is not known to be fabulously wealthy, it surprised Mad Dog--just as those cathedrals in small European cities did.

Actually, Mad Dog had to inquire if it was Catholic, as he has always associated Minnesota with the Lutherans, as anyone who listened to Garrison Keillor would. 

So now,  the report of yet another slaughter of children by a male gunman, as they attended opening ceremonies at their Catholic school.

As so many have noted, school shootings, and mass shootings in America are now so common we have lost track of when the last one was, or where. They are not common events, statistically, but they have a special currency.

Depending on how such shootings are defined and reported, the most common number on Google is 1,300 school shootings over the past 25 years, or 52 a year, or one a week, in a country of 330 million occupying an entire continent. On the other hand, googling, there have been only 14 deaths on commercial airplane flights over that same 25 year period, which might suggest it is safer flying from Boston to San Francisco, statistically, than going to school.

Crime statistics are endlessly arguable, although it's pretty clear from virtually every source, violent crime in American cities has declined precipitately, the reasons being variously ascribed to an aging population, the advent of abortion on demand, which resulted in fewer unwanted, unloved and unattended males. But, of course, now we hear from Stephen Miller that violent crime is on a rampage, which, of course, only Donald Trump and the might of the U.S. military can constrain. One wonders whether Trump will dispatch the Marines to Minneapolis. Mad Dog doubts that, as the population there is of Scandinavian origin, predominantly, so in Trumps eyes, it could not be all that bad and in need of tanks and bludgeons, George Floyd notwithstanding.

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

There are two problems Mad Dog is pretty sure he has no easy answer for: 

1. Homelessness  and 

2. Mass shootings.

In both cases, the role of insanity, mental instability, whatever you want to call it, plays at least some role.  

In the case of the homeless, there are clearly some homeless who are homeless by choice, intractably homeless, because their own mental makeup makes them unable and/or unwilling to live indoors near or with or in close proximity to other people. Some homeless, clearly would love to live in shelters with a roof and four walls, but do not have access to that. But some, likely a small percentage, really do not want to live in a fixed address indoors. Some are simply wedded to a life of addiction which makes rent, rules, social stability simply impossible. Others are simply victims of a quasi capitalist economy with too few safety nets. Those who study homelessness seem to indicate it is a problem which might be solved by government intervention. Certainly, big corporations have shown no inclination to solve this problem as there is no profit to be made, unlike with prisoners, who can be cash cows in private prisons.

Some cities in Texas have reduced homelessness with what appears to be simple solutions: changing zoning codes so inexpensive housing can be built.

Other solutions, most notably the infamous "housing projects" for the poor in cities like Baltimore became dens of iniquity and were actually razed out of frustration, when government and citizens decided they were worse than the original problem. "The Wire" documents this story in great detail. In other cities, New York City, housing projects have been significantly more successful. There are more roofs on housing projects in NYC (>700,000) than there are roofs in all of the city of Boston. 

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

As for school shootings, the reduction in access to guns and, more likely, to bullets may be something which at least reduces the likelihood of such anathemas. There are experiments in Australia, and even in America, where efforts at gun control seemed to coincide with reductions in overall shooting deaths, but school shootings, mass shootings in general, may not follow form, inasmuch as they seem to be special cases.

Even defining what constitutes a mass shooting is controversial, but nobody has any trouble defining what constitutes a school shooting from Columbine to Sandy Hook at  Newtown, Connecticut is not in doubt. (Unless of course, you are Alex Jones, who claimed Sandy Hook never happened, and whose lawyer said, on national TV, unless you were at the morgue yourself, to see the bodies of the children, personally, you could not be sure the whole thing was any more real than the moon landing.)

Mad Dog tried to visit the Portsmouth High School not long ago, and it felt like he was entering a high security prison, with walls of bullet proof glass in panels arrayed in such a way nobody could progress rapidly through them.

Trying to ride his bicycle through the parking lot of Marston [elementary] School in Hampton, as a short cut to the beach, Mad Dog was stopped by a police officer stationed there and questioned about whether he had a child in the school and he replied, no, he was just taking a short cut to the beach. He was sent packing. 

We will likely never know what motivated the Minneapolis shooter: He ended his own life before he could be questioned.

Chris Rock has a riff about "Black crimes" and "White Crimes" and he says that when you hear someone has shot kids in a school playground, you know it's a young White male. 

Christopher Hitchens once observed that people who do unimaginably horrific things, like blowing up a bomb in a crowded market, or blowing up a school, or shooting children, are either motivated by religious fervor, which is the only thing which can justify such vile behavior in otherwise ostensibly sane people, or they are psychotic.  

Even though this most recent shooting was at a Catholic school, one suspects it was not because the kids and their teachers were Catholics, although, as has been noted, we'll never know.

All we'll know is this is primarily an American phenomenon. 

At least we perceive it as such.

Occasionally, you hear about school killings and mass kidnapping in Africa. And who knows what is happening in Asia? 

But, Mad Dog's impression is "This America, man."