With kids "desensitized" and tragically inspired by violent media and video games, U.S. schools have become the battlefield, leaving more students dead since Jan. 1 than U.S. service members, and turning the gun control debate into a push for hardened schools during the American copycat terror epidemic.
"More people have been murdered in schools so far this year than have been killed while serving in the U.S. military, according to depressing statistics," the New York Daily News wrote this week.
With the latest school shooter not using an AR-15, the student safety debates stressed the hardening of schools over the gun-control activist push to the ban of specific assault weapons, according to various political talk show appearances Sunday.
"We have our schools that are not hard targets," Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, R-Texas, told ABC's "This Week." "We've done a good job since 9/11 of protecting government buildings, and airports and private buildings, but we have not done anything to harden the target at our schools."
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined the calls for hardened schools Saturday.
"We can't just let our kids be sitting ducks," Paxton told Fox News. "I don't think it's just about preventing people from accessing guns because that's not going to be enough. We've got to figure out a way to prevent people from getting in our schools."
Patrick pointed to the near unanimous teenage exposure to violence in media, especially the widely popular shooting video games, as a reason for danger among school-aged kids in America.
"Should we be surprised in this nation?" Patrick asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos. "We have devalued life.
". . . We have witnessed the breakup of family through violent movies, particularly of violent video games, which now outsell movies and music. Psychologists and psychiatrists will tell you that students are desensitized to violence, may have lost empathy for their victims by watching hours and hours of video violent games. Ninety-seven percent, George, of teenagers, according to psychiatrists and psychologists, watch video games and 85 percent of those are violent games."
NRA President Oliver North, former U.S. Lt. Colonel, told "Fox News Sunday" stopping "the carnage" will require metal detectors at schools to "harden the place efficiently."
North also echoed Patrick's remarks on the breakdown of U.S. teen boys and excessive exposure to video-game violence.
"The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence," North told host Chris Wallace. "Nearly all of these perpetrators are male and they are young teenagers in most cases. And they have come through a culture where violence is commonplace.
". . . All you need to do is turn on the TV, go to the movie. If you look at what has happened to the young people, many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten."
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