I wish I could agree with this but I can’t.
The children is today’s America are not self disciplined enough (in general) to be trusted to carry firearms except under constant supervision.
Today’s children are in general an unrulely mess who do not respect their parents or their elders.
Unfortunately divorce, two working parent families, mass entertainment that denigrates fathers has so degraded children’s mental picture of parental authority that our society’s children’s social structure has degraded to the level of “Lord of the Flies”.
No until we have reestablished the sovereignty of the family I don’t think we can again trust children with firearms unless they are under constant adult supervision.
Well, even in this ideal society you dream of (in which case, our children wouldn’t need to carry weapons to school to defend themselves against psychotic mass murderers in the first place), there’d still be a lower limit where the children are simply not strong enough to deal with the recoil of anything large enough to stop a gunman, or not experienced enough to shoot accurately, or whatever. Even if you look at history, although teenagers may have carried weapons and fought in battles and such with great frequency, they were considered adult members of society at those times, and actual children weren’t allowed to do such things.
Plus, I was using schools as an example to make the point that there will always still be places (hospitals, adult daycares, mental health institutions, laboratories, YMCA’s, etc) that there are either safety considerations or other practical reasons that would cause people to not carry their weapons.
But, the problems go deeper than how our children are allowed to behave. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with both parents working if that’s what’s needed to pay the bills, or the children aren’t really affected - in most cases, if a couple just wants something that’s too expensive, the non-working spouse doesn’t go out and get a job, they go out and get a new credit card instead. Mass entertainment that makes fun of fathers only succeeds because society (including the people it makes fun of) tunes in or buys tickets - if nobody watched, they’d catch on pretty quick that they should do something else cause money talks in Hollywood. Children can’t be expected to respect their parents if their parents waste hours a day chatting to cute guys they meet on Myspace and feeding their WoW addiction and quitting one ‘boring’ or ‘annoying’ job after another and in general acting like they’re 14 while their teenagers are getting their own steady jobs and paying for their own rent and groceries and such... let’s say that the ‘Soveirgnty of the family’ has suffered because personal responsibility has suffered and adults are no longer acting like adults ought to.