Are We Teaching Our Children to Kill?

I read something the other day that absolutely horrified me. It was just a filler statistic in the paper, but I have not been able to get it out of my mind.

It said that by the age of 14, the average child will have seen over 41,000 simulated deaths!

I've been thinking about that and I have no idea how anyone could have come up with that figure. But, I do believe that our children are seeing far, far too many deaths, both simulated and real. So many, in fact, that death and the taking of life are becoming, to them, a very normal part of living.

Think about it. With TV, the internet, movies and computer games our children are bombarded with death and killing.

We are shocked when a kid takes a gun to school and kills other children or adults.

Why does that shock us when that's all they see all around them. How many parents bother to govern what their children watch? Does it occur to us that if we let our children play games where they kill their opponent, they might think that is the way it is in real life? Or do we just assume that they will know the difference? They can't know the difference if we don't teach them.

We need to get more in tune with our children. We need to start paying attention to them.

If a child has a problem that they just don't know how to handle and their answer for it turns out to be to get a gun and kill the source of their problem, how could it have been prevented?

When that happens, I've heard many people say that the child should not have had access to a gun. Very true. But there's more to it than that.

I grew up in the country where everyone hunted, everyone had guns and ammunition in their house. And, believe it or not, those guns and ammo were right out in the open, usually hanging on a gun rack made of deer hooves... But, none of us kids would have ever thought that taking one of those guns and killing someone was an answer to a problem. We were taught that you do not kill people. Period.