AND FINALLY it has come to our country too. So far it has been a matter of somebody’s kids killing somebody else’s kids. Now it is our children shooting and killing the children next door. Is it not time for introspection? If school is not safe for our kids, then this whole world is not going to be safe for them. We need to look into this new gun culture seriously.
The event manifests all the characteristics of an international school shoot-out. Two students of the same age and class engage in a shooting spree and kill one of their classmates. The curtain rises to reveal another social disorder and sets parents across the nation thinking. If a simple altercation between two students on the one side and another on the other could lead to pulling the trigger five times, taking turns, what more is in store for us from our kids in the coming days?
It is really frightening to visualise the sequence of events. The two accused are reported to have taken turns to shoot the innocent classmate point blank. The victim, Abhishek, received four bullets and was declared dead at the hospital. What makes our kids take to guns?
Children these days are much more than what they are really supposed to be. Their demeanour is something which their own parents and teachers cannot fathom. Many instances show that kids behave really menacingly in their circles. Most of the time their rage and reservations defy comprehension and as a result, they cut a sorry figure.
The family ambience is to be blamed for this. Parents these days pander to their kids and even take pride in publicising such pandering on their part. The amount money these affluent school children wangle from their parents poses another problem. Money is a menace when it comes to school kids. They develop a tendency to view everything in terms of money. This leads them to believe that it is alright to do things which are not socially binding, for money is all powerful. They learn this lesson from their affluent parents and elders.
Society has to take the blame for this falling standard of children’s behaviour. It is complacent and increasingly accommodates any aberration on the part of children after a few bouts of hesitation and rejection. Once accepted, the kids pick up antisocial practices and put them to use whenever there arises a chance. For example, the male-dominant society increasingly feels that it is alright to intimidate girls. This notion is picked up by the kids and exploited when they grow up. So is the case with habits and practices. Who doesn’t know that smoking is harmful? Who would accept a school boy who drinks? But, there are numerous boys and girls who are exposed to drug and booze.
In the past children were kept at a distance. There was a healthy distance between parents and children and there was a strong barrier between what children can access and cannot access. Children were free to do certain things and not at all free to do certain things. Making money was difficult, not speak of laundering it. Pressure was limited and so were ambitions and anxieties.
What is happening now? Children and parents are friends. There is nothing wrong with it though. Still, parents are parents because they are the ones who impart to the children the basic lessons concerning righteousness and crime and many other facts of life.
But what do modern parents do? They want to use their children as tools which can help them in becoming successful in life. These kids are pressurized and pestered by parents, peers and society, this pressure mounts to such an extent that they get restive, impatient and short-tempered. When they give vent to their frustration, innocents get killed and schools become breeding grounds for crime. So I think the ball is in the court of the parents themselves. It is time they took stock of the situation.
The media our children are constantly exposed to is full of incidents extolling the heroics of gun-wielding characters. The trigger-happy heroes and villains kill people point black. The story also explains how the police case thereof is politically and monetarily dealt with. What lessons do our kids pick up from the media? The atrocities the more-than-a-hundred TV channels beam under one pretext or the other, keep the kids glued to the screen. For the kid, seeing is believing, of course.
Even the food habit of our kids is undergoing a transformation. They stuff themselves with what is called ‘exotic food’. These food products boast of ingredients which can cause emotional and hormonal imbalance in kids, especially those in their formative years. Many children from affluent families suffer from the after-effects of an alien food culture and eating habit. This is also one of the reasons why our kids these days are heftier.
The first-ever incident of this kind at a Gurgaon school is enough to warn us that the menace is around the corner and more and more kids who have access to guns in their homes would think of imitating the shoot-out. The seed has been already sown and the most unfortunate thing is that some of our leading schools are excellent breeding grounds for this new gun culture. Things have come full circle and our society too would ‘come of age’ soon, a la foreign societies: guns for self-defence. It does not augur well for a nation which has given the world a new order and forced the world to dedicate a day to non-violence. Gandhiism is increasingly becoming relevant. Non-violence is no nonsense.
Once a mother and her son visited Gandhi and sought some advice from him. The boy had this bad habit of eating too much sugar. After listening to the case, Gandhi advised them to come back after a week. When they returned after a week, Gandhi called the boy around and told him gently, “Dear child, sugar is good, but too much sugar is harmful to health. So don’t eat it too much”.
“You could have told this last week itself, Gandhiji. We would have been spared of the journey back and forth”, said the mother.
Gandhi said nothing. Later he admitted that he himself had the habit of eating sugar and it was unfair for him to advise that boy. So he let them come back after a week. By that time he had quit the habit of eating sugar himself!
If we want our kids to stay away from guns, we have to be away from them, in the first place! All gun-holding parents, (whether the guns are licensed or not), please note: “It may be your kid’s turn to get killed tomorrow. There is nothing that parents cannot do for their children, good or bad. Good or gun? You decide”.
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