KIDS AND GUNS

“KIDS

AND

GUNS”
- mike MALES.

What if the Press Covered the Old Like it Does the Young?

To illustrate public and media biases against youths, imagine that the press portrayed senior citizens the way it does adolescents. My following, hypothetical media story on “senior violence” (quoted on National Public Radio affiliate KPPC-FM, Pasadena’s, “All Things Considered”) incorporates real incidents from the last year and the latest crime figures from the California Criminal Justice Statistics Center, Department of Corrections, and Center for Health Statistics:

“SENIOR VIOLENCE” ALARMS EXPERTS

A 71-year-old sprays a quiet church with gunfire, four dead or wounded. Another septuagenarian guns down two in a bloody office slaughter. On successive days, graying residents open fire with automatic weapons on dozens of people in senior citizens’ centers in Arizona and Michigan, killing or maiming eight. In a picturesque beach community on Monterey Bay, an enraged 61-year-old shoots two neighbors to death over a trivial falling out. An elderly Santa Ana man beats a 14-year-old to death in a rage, tossing his corpse in a ditch.

Once seen as sweet, doting grandparents incapable of violence, America’s and California’s senior citizens are committing mass murders and displaying surges in violent crimes unknown to previous generations. In a particularly shocking trend, more people were murdered in mass, public shootings by senior citizens in the last 12 months than in all of America’s schools put together.

A generation ago, old folks didn’t act like this.