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Originally Posted by Intense1
Dear Analog.
Greetings - I have enjoyed reading your stuff in many threads, but I must (as a newbie does) respond to your latest on this one.
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Awesome! Thanks for reading
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...but with every stinkin' school shooting where kids are killed, we all lose, because we're losing our future. When you think about it, if this was a one-room school house, and almost all the girls in school that day were shot - many of them are dead - it means that for this group of Amish families, a whole generation of future wives and mothers is dead, never to be resurrected. And for their community, this could be devastating.
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Right now, there are 6,561,366,423 people on this planet. I am not attempting to marginalize or downplay the horrible deaths of these people... but saying that one community suffers because of 6 deaths is thinking way too narrow about humans as a race (plus i'm pretty sure 6 people isn't that many even to the Amish). When we approach the killing numbers of Stalin, or Hitler, we can resume talks about making dents in generational losses.
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...But you are equating the death of adults and that of children?
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Yes. A human life is a human life. There is no difference.
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Yes, both are heinous, but at least adults have the ability to fight back, and have lived a bit of their lives. Children are helpless, and because they are, they must be protected.
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A room full of hostage-at-gunpoint adults are just as helpless as a room full of hostage-at-gunpoint children... and we're not talking about protecting live kids, we're talking about whether dead kids mean more than dead "adults".
I've said it many times before, but I find it absurd and horrid that people would weigh human life at all, let alone weigh one person against another and call one more important. Children are
not more important.
If you
really want to argue lineage and reproduction (which I think is completely besides the point), then I would point out that all the children in the world can't reproduce- it takes an adult. Hypothetically kill some children, you've still got plenty of adults to make more. If you kill adults, then you not only can't reproduce for many years, but there's no one to teach and raise the children. This has never been a factor in my argument, so don't pick it apart. I'm just countering the argument that you "lose a generation" of people when kids die, since that was put forth as a reason why children would be more important. I find that to be an illogical assertion.
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Plus, there is something in every society that propels them to protect their young - it is so in humans, and it is so in animals, as well.
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Again, this whole story and the dead children have nothing to do with protecting. They're already gone. We're talking about the story of their death, not how to protect them more. Incidentally, there's little or nothing that could have been done to prevent this totally random act of violence, short of every teacher in the country being armed with an Uzi. And yes, but many animals also eat their young, abandon their young, and kill their young if they feel threatened by them- or, in the case of lions, if they take over a pride of female lions, they will kill all the young who are not their offspring. Nature can be a bitch, too.
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3. I'm sorry - I thought this was about discussing the event itself, not about the media's coverage of it. Hey, CNN, FOX and MSNBC will cover anything that is newsworthy, and this is indeed, newsworthy. When the killing of school children isn't newsworthy then the US will have become a truly heartless nation.
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I never said it wasn't newsworthy, I said the deaths of children are hyped far more than that of anyone else. of course it's newsworthy.
Thanks for the responses, I'm enjoying this discussion!