Piers Morgan Tonight: Societal Change

Last night I watched "Piers Morgan Tonight," a current events show on CNN. It was an incredibly intense show! Here's what happened: piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com. I got pretty fired up about it and this is my response to last night's show.

I just got my teaching degree, my fiancé is a high school teacher, my sisters and brother are all teachers, and my parents are both teachers. None of us would feel comfortable being required to carry a gun at school. In Kentucky (where I currently reside) law it is required that the gun course is "no longer than 8 hours." I am a very quick learner, but I would absolutely not feel that less than eight hours would be sufficient training for anyone, let alone teachers. Schools are not the place for guns.

I feel like tragedies such as this bring out what is closest to everyone's hearts. Piers is intensely passionate about gun control. Dr. Gupta talked about how he thinks that mental health needs to be taken on in a "homeland security" type fashion. Other people are concerned about video game violence. I agree so much with all of these things! But I think that while we need to pass the laws on gun control, change our healthcare system, and crack down more on video game content, we need to use all these things to change our culture. It's our job as parents, future parents, teachers, and, ultimately, humans, to model and teach a safe culture.

We need to change the way our culture sees gun violence, starting at home and going all the way to Washington. At home, we need to put away the video games, turn off the television, and play with our kids. At school, we need to enforce the "zero tolerance" policy against bullying and threats. In communities, we need to educate people on mental illness and change the way we deal with it. In our country, we need to pass laws that make it illegal to buy weapons like the ones that have been instrumental in three mass shootings this year alone, as well as change our healthcare system to actually help mentally ill people.

Above all, we need to, as a society, stop glorifying violence. Our movies are more violent than ever, the media shows incredibly graphic things from tragedies all around the world, and video game graphics are getting increasingly "real." While I understand that movies are just movies, the media reports what it sees as being relevant and important, and games are just games, developing brains have an incredibly hard time distinguishing what they see on the TV from what's "okay" in real life. We are more violent right now as a society than ever before and, contrary to what one of your guests said tonight, it is a culture specific to America. We need to make sure that our children are not seeing violence on a daily basis, and we need to start that now.

I am so impressed with Piers and CNN's work covering this tragic story. It's hard for us all, but we at home can turn off the TV and go do something else; they will be covering this for a long time. Piers had a brilliant show last night and I can't wait to see Cory Booker tonight!

"Be the change you wish to see in the world." --Gandhi