Vandalizing childhood.

 "The pump don't work because the vandals took the handles."      

        Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Robo-calls, Spam e-mail, and School shootings. 

A free and open society is subject to vandalism.

My first phone call of the morning was at 6:21 Pacific Time. I was awake and at my computer. My wife was asleep. This was a live caller, not a tape recorded voice of "Amy, from Account Services." I ask if the person is a real person, and ask them to add two plus three. That stumps a robot call, and they hang up. 

This morning's early caller was a live person in a room with voices all around him--a boiler-room. He spoke English with a south Asian accent. He said he was calling from "U.S.Medicare" and he wanted to know if I had a new Medicare card.  He says he wants to confirm my new number, date of birth, and Social Security number. I tell him I am already "all set."

More often the callers want access to financial information. I get two or three phone calls every single day from people purporting to warn me that I had bought something expensive from Amazon earlier that day. They warn me that I had just purchased something via Amazon, and ask if I confirm or deny the purchase. The callers want to guide me through a process to give them access to my desktop computer so they can "remove the false charge." The goal is to get me to enter a website address in the search bar and give them my computer credentials. The website address has an innocuous and reassuring name, like "SecurityTeam." Googling that website address reveals it as a scam phishing fraud. 

I get about 20 spam emails a day from hot women who want to have sex with me right now, companies with penis enlargement drugs, or companies that will fix toenail fungus.

People can call or e-mail me. That is the point of those utilities. Spammers and fraudsters have taken advantage of their openness. They are vandals. 

School shooters are a grotesque and exaggerated form of vandal. They take advantage of our openness. 

I used to drop my son off at elementary school. I considered that he was going from the safety of a home to the presumed safety of a school. I considered it very different from, say, dropping a ten year old off on a downtown Medford street corner and telling him to have fun, learn stuff, and that I would see him in seven hours. Elementary schools are not cocoons, but they aren't prisons either. School playgrounds are outside. Parents come and go from the school. There are band and choir concerts that parents, grandparents, and the community attend. There is soccer practice and soccer games all day on Saturdays. 

It would be impossible to harden an elementary school sufficiently to stop a body-armored, AR-15-carrying intruder who might come at any time children are around, inside or outside. It would take a multiple SWAT teams on high alert twelve hours a day. Impossible. 

Yet, in the face of the apparent impossibility of changing our country's relationship to mass ownership of guns, the public debate is looking at changing schools by turning them into fortresses. I read suggestions that schools need a single entry point. We need armed guards, Ted Cruz suggests. Others suggest schools hire teachers with the dual skillset of education and interdiction of armed intruders. 

The news today is all about the inadequacy of the police response to the shooting in Texas. There is a lesson here, if we pay attention. We see that people have a very reasonable reluctance to charge into an unknown situation to confront a man shooting a gun. Police were not mentally nor tactically prepared to confront the shooter until they had overwhelming force. I draw an inference. The idea of armed defense of schools is better in theory than in practice. The Texas school had an armed guard. So did the Parkland, Florida school. The notion of "hard" school is a false path, or certainly a leaky one. Not only is it a budget disaster, adding pay for guards on top of pay for educators, it is a practical impossibility. Children will gather in places that are designed to be accessible to the public, not places that are hardened against a surprise visit from an armed and armored intruder. And if school classrooms are hardened, what about birthday parties, baseball fields, summer camps, or kids playing outdoors alone or in groups? What about unsupervised kids playing cowboys and Indians, the way I did 60 years ago?

We can harden airplanes but we cannot harden childhood. We need to look in a different direction for any real solution. We will always have vandals but we need to change our attitudes and expectations about guns. We need to change minds. It may take decades. It took decades to change attitudes toward smoking. It may be impossible, but that is the task ahead for Americans.