The archery expert with gun demands better parenting.
Recent mass shootings have prompted plenty of talk, much of it contradictory. Actor Jeremy Renner first appeared in the Demand a Plan PSA. He then cooled on the PSA as it was interpreted to be about restricting guns and/or reducing violence in Hollywood.
Apparently, he had a third way in mind to reduce gun violence:
I believe our salvation begins in each of our homes.
It starts with parenting, which has become increasingly more challenging in recent years. Outside the fact that in most households BOTH parents must work to provide for their family, it just gives the parents less time for.. well, parenting.
In a communication age where technology is growing at a much faster rate than we can truly understand, our youth has available to them more information and access to pretty much everything before they are socially and mentally matured.
Our children need to be attended to with even greater care. How can this be achieved? Is this an impossible task? Well, I believe its a start…
Indeed, suburban isolation, lack of access to mental health care or treatment, and the dearth of opportunities for young people to learn the discipline of gun safety have all been offered up as contributing factors. Reversing any of these would be attending to our children “with even greater care.”
The statistics to review in cases like these aren’t the specifics related to the relatively small sample size of mass shootings but the general data related to the much more prevalent incidence of violent crime:
The National Study of Child Abuse reported that, “compared to children living with married biological parents, those who had a single parent and a live-in partner had … over 10 times the rate of abuse, and nearly 8 times the rate of neglect.”
Several studies have shown that fatherless children have twice the rate of incarceration of their peers and that adolecents who murder are more likely to have had parents divorced or never married.
90% of children from homes with both a broken marriage and a lack of supervision become delinquent while only 6% of children from homes with both an intact marriage and adequate supervision become delinquent.
Notice how these all back up Mr. Renner’s thesis. It may be that the archer with a gun from Hollywood has a point; our homes are a place to start.
Renner is absolutely right. A child that is brought up in a well-kept home will first of all, most likely, not find a reason needed to shoot up a public area of innocents. And I say that as a “well-kept” home, not an overprotective one. Overprotection is just as dangerous to a child as underprotection is.
Look at it like a Marginal Benefit and Marginal Cost chart. On the far left of the X-axis, there is “underprotection”, thus leaving open space for delinquincy. On the far right is “overprotection”, thus leaving the opportunity of smothering and oppression of a child that tends to make them feel suppressed and belittled, or sometimes they even accumulate fear of a parent. And in the middle is just “protection”. There’s slight freedom and slight mature decisions that the child can’t make by themselves that the parent makes. The MC of overprotection in parenting makes the child feel oppressed. The MC of underprotection gives them too much freedom into delinquency. The MB of underprotection is that you as a parent doesn’t have to deal with the child. The MB of overprotection is that you know you’re child is safe (more or less). Where the MB and MC meet in the middle of your chart, which should just be regular “protective” parenting with additions of freedom yet loyalty to the parents, is right where MC = MB.
As I’ve said: too much protection = bad. Too little protection = bad.
But overall, Renner is aboslutely correct.