It’s not worse. It’s not better. It’s wrong.
I always feel uncomfortable when people think that dead kids is the “worst of evil”. There’s no gradient in death, it’s sad in every case.
We think that a 50 year old man killed randomly by a shooter is less of a big deal because he’s in the middle of his life but what if he was about to enjoy the best 20 years of his life after working hard for it? On the opposite what if the kid killed was going to ruin some people’s lives by drunk driving, hitting a family van? We’ll never know. It ended abruptly and all we have are our eyes to cry.
My cold ass orphan past probably makes me think this way but I never really considered kids as kids but as small adults. I don’t forget that they understand things, even if they can’t express them through language. I don’t forget that in some countries right now, some are soldiers and trained to kill people, or that in some culture kids have sex very early on or watch it. It weirds me out too but you can understand how this is possible if you don’t treat kids as little pure and cute things that they aren’t, sorry to hurt you Western normative culture. They are small adults with shitty experience and that’s why we need to nurture them, not because they’re virtually perfect, adorable little miniature of oneself. After four or five years on this planet, they are not.
I especially don’t like how people realize that children dying from bullets is a terrible thing when as Jezebel notes, “black children accounted for forty-five percent of all child gun deaths in the United States, despite being only fifteen percent of the child population.” Please read the report and think of things like “Between 1979 and 2009, gun deaths among white children decreased by 44 percent and increased by 30 percent among black children over the same period.”
Nobody gave/gives a shit. No one cares, it’s like black people are not part of society. But a tragedy happens and the nation’s emotional attachment to it is strong enough that it might change things. I hope.
Too bad all these dead black kids never had any impact on gun laws. I feel sorry because if they had, a lot of children include those white kids from Newton could be alive today.
So much for preventing the “worst of evil”.