Tuesday, January 08, 2008 Obenieta: Starting ‘em young, with a bang By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
SHOOT for the moon. But such airy bit of blarney —”If you miss you will still be among the stars” — succeeds only in pissing me off when my eldest son couldn’t even aim straight into the toilet bowl.
Seems like a bull’s eye is nowhere nearer than a pie in the sky as far as my four-year-old Spider-Man-wannabe is concerned. But if he’d glare at me for being myopic, perhaps I could assuage him that the real world isn’t devoid of the quixotic.
Look, for instance, at City Councilor Edgardo Labella. Short of tilting at windmills, he’s stirring a tempest in the teacup of the Federation of Parents, Teachers, Community Association (FPTCA). Counter the culture of violence.
So goes the challenge of the Cebu City legislator against the proliferation of loose firearms, his ears still ringing about a 12-year-old boy in Lapu-Lapu City who reportedly played with his father’s gun and injured an 11-year-old neighbor. “Police said the .357 revolver went off when the boy threw it on the table while his parents were fighting,” says the dispatch.
That’s no news to the Violence Policy Center (VPC). A non-profit educational foundation in America, the center “examines the role of firearms, conducts research on violence, and explores new policies and proposals to decrease firearm-related death or injury.” Chilling is its conclusion: “The number of children unintentionally shot and killed each year in the United States could fill a commercial airliner…These numbers add up to a Columbine massacre every four days for America’s youth.”
If children in the US are “far more likely to be shot and killed than their counterparts in other industrial nations,” as stated by a 1997 study, blame it on “their access to firearms” at home. A survey called “Guns in America” found that 57 percent of these weapons are “usually kept unlocked.”
There will be blood to bank on, adds another VPC research called “Young Guns: How the Gun Lobby Nurtures America’s Youth Gun Culture.” It documents how America’s children, with a wink or two from the gun industry and organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA), have been spurred on to be gung-ho about guns.
“Are Gun Rights Lost on Our Kids?” So asked the cover of American Rifleman magazine featuring a multi-ethnic array of children surrounding actor Charlton Heston (Who can forget him for playing Moses in “The Ten Commandments” and for getting his pants pulled in Michael Moore’s docu, “Bowling for Columbine”?). Raising a generation of pro-gun kids, according to VPC, amounts to hitting two birds with one bullet: To guarantee future customers for the industry and political foot soldiers for the NRA.
“Age is not the major yardstick,” contends a pro-gun pamphlet. “The only real measures are those of maturity and individual responsibility.”
No kidding, if you’d ask the father of Tre Merrit, a five-year-old boy, who made headlines last month after shooting to death a 440-pound bear while hunting with his grandfather in Arkansas. When Tre’s father was asked how he felt bout his son’s feat, tears rolled down his cheeks as he gasped, “It’s just absolutely amazing.”
So far, my two little men are always on the dot at triggering parental panic, their fingers pointing at superheroes in the mall’s toy section. Wild about wearing Spider-Man and Power Rangers costumes, my rascals. Will they fancy an adventure in the forest soon and take the cue of their other cartoon idol Diego who’s fond of animal rescue?
Not a comforting idea. Last I heard, the sharp-shooting boy from Arkansas, who has also previously fell down three deers, wants to kill a turkey and an elk next time.
