The Problems We Face Are Larger Than the Schools We Need to Protect. Our Solutions Need to Be Bigger, Too.

There are a lot of voices just now suggesting that America might learn from the students who marched in cities across the country this past weekend. Watching the marches and surveying other news out of Austin, we draw another set of lessons that applies to both the adults in charge and the students in protest.The news over the weekend that didn't get the attention it deserved involved alleged Austin bomber Mark Anthony Conditt. He made a video calling himself a "psychopath" before blowing himself up after being surrounded by police last week. In the cellphone-recorded confession, he reportedly said he didn't have any remorse for carrying out attacks that killed two people, wounded several others, and put Texas' capital city on edge. He also questioned himself about his lack of remorse for his deadly actions.What does this have to do with those student protests and what all of us can learn from recent events? While Conditt didn't use a gun, he fits into the category of individuals we have seen too much of over the past several years: young, dejected individuals who turn to mass violence for seemingly incomprehensible reasons. Even when there is a reason — Dylan Roof conducted a methodical massacre in a church in Charleston, S.C., because of his white supremacist views — we are left to ask how a youth in America today could embrace such closed and idiotic thinking.Here is about where most people offer mental illness as an explanation. But upon study, that explanation falls far short. Raising it usually just unfairly denigrates those who suffer a mental illness (and thereby reinforces a social stigma that degrades the quality of life for millions of people) rather than getting to the larger issue of why we now live in an age of mass attacks.That brings us to the student protesters. What the National Rifle Association and other gun advocates don't seem to realize is that the March for Our Lives protesters possess a moral power that shouldn't be discounted. Students speaking out gets attention because it is novel and, more importantly, because these are the very people who are put at risk by school shootings.In America, everyone has a right to speak out. In this case, high school students have a lot of moral weight because they have the specific right to defend themselves against the threat of being shot. Regardless of whether you like the ideas being pushed at these rallies — raising age requirements for buying guns, banning certain categories of guns and gun accessories, and imposing background checks on all gun sales — when the very people at risk speak up, their voice tends to carry the kind of power that can force change.And it is that moral power that is crucial as our society confronts the reasons for the eruption of mass violence in recent decades. Let's take the steps necessary to keep guns out of the wrong hands. And let us also recognize what Conditt should remind us of: Evil lurks among us and therefore the seemingly growing bloc of disaffected youth is a crisis of our times.Back in the 1960s, Timothy Leary famously called on a generation to "turn on, tune in, drop out." Today's youth aren't exactly heeding that call, but from our urban areas to our suburbs and through the rural reaches of America, the disintegration of social institutions is leaving too many young Americans disconnected from society. If youths didn't drop out, our society too often drops them out. Public schools that struggled to educate every child, an economy that offers few opportunities that feel achievable, and a society awash in opioids and other drugs all feed a social cancer. A continual erosion of civic trust and engagement can only contribute to an unhealthy social skepticism, a form of that cancer.We can see the net result in a society where overall criminal violence is down compared with decades ago, while high-profile mass attacks are more common. We are a society that drove down murder rates in our major cities — a seemingly intractable problem a few decades ago — but now fidget in the face of mass attacks that range from school shootings to mass murder at churches, a movie theater, and a bombing campaign here in Texas.The vast majority of Americans, of course, work assiduously at building productive lives, and the factors underneath these other social ills seem as incomprehensible as the reasons for the mass attacks themselves. But we don't have to see completely around the corner to start developing solutions. And here is the lesson we are drawing from all of this: Student engagement is a good sign. But if we are to see few Conditts and fewer school shooters, we will need student protesters and the adults in charge to find ways to plug our society back into those now falling off to the side.Nikolas Cruz displayed an array of red flags before he brought his guns to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He never should have been allowed to get his hands on a weapon. But disarming people like him is only one crucial step. The steps that follow have to move us toward the work required to identify youths heading down the wrong path and then rebuild the social structures that can pull them back. That is work that will best be done by both the students now becoming politically active and the adults in elective office.The Austin bomber has to remind us that the problems we face are larger than the schools we need to protect, and therefore our solution needs to be bigger, too.  Continue reading...