We have an image of America as being further advanced than the rest of the world in all areas. The rest of the world tends to follow the patterns that America sets. Last week's shooting incident in Jonesboro, Ark., in which two young boys fired into a schoolyard, proved to us that we don't live in an innocent world. We live in a society where deadly weapons are not just readily available, but are available to children who know how to use them. The school shoot-out massacres that have taken place in Jonesboro, Paducah, Ky., and Pearl, Miss., have made the whole nation aware of how violent our society is.
School violence is at an all-time peak.
Educational researchers estimate that 135,000 children bring guns to school every day. Walter Williams of the Dallas Morning Newspaper reported that 1,000 teachers require medical attention because of in-school assaults and an additional 125,000 teachers are threatened monthly. When our parents were in school, they only had to fear the school bully who tried to take other kids' milk money, but today's students are lucky to graduate without seeing a knife or a gun in the classroom. The 1993 FBI Uniform Crime Report said that children under the age of 18 were 244 percent more likely to be killed by guns than they were in 1986. The 1994 Children's Defense Fund Poll estimates that one in six adolescents between the ages of 10 and 17 has seen or knows someone who has been shot.