Please pray--difficult child jumped today

Marguerite

Active Member
Dude told me "You have NO idea what goes on in our world daily Momma, it's NOT the 1980's. You can't even walk down the street any more without someone pulling a gun on you in our nice neighborhood."

Sometimes I'm very grateful to our over-controlling nanny state of an Aussie government. We still have guns, but anyone carrying one on the street who is not on their way to a gun club for practice, or actually working in a job which requires them to carry a gun, such as a security guard carrying out his duties, risks getting pulled in by the cops and getting the book thrown at him. Farmers - they have shotguns, mainly.

That doesn't mean that our criminal element don't carry guns, but with very few guns on the streets, there's no need to ramp up what weaponry you carry. And other weapons also have to be justified, most are illegal. Of course, there is still room for bricks, cricket bats, sporting implements used as weapons - but our laws give our cops a lot of leeway to run someone in for carrying something with the intent to use it as a weapon.

The way I see it - guns are one weapon that can rapidly take away a life. True, so can knives, but you have to work at it a little harder, as a rule. And in Australia, kids under 16 can't even buy cutlery. I think they can buy plastic cutlery, but I'm not sure. So if the family is going on a picnic and mum forgot to pack the knives and forks, she or dad have to go and buy some. Not send a kid under 16 into the shop.

We grumble about this a lot because it can be very inconvenient. I carry a Swiss army knife but I'm constantly aware that I could get pulled over by the cops for a random search (which I have to submit to by law) and then have to justify what I carry.

However, all this doesn't necessarily make things more law-abiding here. If Sydney thugs want to hurt someone or kill them, it just means it's a lot messier. The bikie attack on a bloke at Sydney airport is a case in point. That was messy and nasty. No guns involved, but the bloke was still very dead. I think the main weapon was a metal garbage bin. And boots.

We still have crime. I can't guarantee that if Dude moved here, for example, he would find things any "nicer". But the chances of him having a gun shoved at him would be greatly reduced.

Dude and the other kids we've talked to have a point - this isn't the 80s (or the 70s, or whenever it was that we grew up). We're in an era where kids will deliberately choose to beat someone up AND film it, then upload the film where everybody can see it, around the world. This self-perpetuates a culture of increased violence for its own sake. In our day if someone beat you up, there generally was a reason that at least made sense to the attacker.

When I was a kid, the word would go out that Jack was going to be fighting Joe behind the sheds at 4 o'clock, come and watch. Or a fight might break out in the school playground, and kids would spread the word fast and come running to watch, barely ahead of teachers ready to drag the fighters apart and administer their own swift justice. But otherwise - nothing big, nothing longer-term nasty as a rule. The criminal element rarely impacted the school. Kids weren't targetted by drug pushers, not at such a young age.

It's the increased involvement of gangs in organised crime, the need for organised crime to make lots of money fast and the increased competition between gangs for money and control, that has reduced the moral standard (what there was of it) in how they do their business. That nasty stuff was always there, but now it has expanded to involve and often target our kids.

We have had a drug culture in our village for some time. We all have known who was in it. We have known where people go for their supply. How it comes in. Who's doing it. Where they live. They do have guns, because people have seen those guns at night when a delivery is made from a container ship moored offshore.

The cops haven't been able to get these guys - whenever a raid was happening, the pushers were getting tipped off. But it was in the news late last year, they got the snake. And the rest of his gang. Sadly, a kid I know got caught up in it, because his father had involved him. Nice.

When difficult child 3 was getting physically attacked, it wasn't anybody connected to crime in our village. Not even the relatives. But the culture that allows this stuff to continue expands out a lot further than the direct involvement of the drug pushers and their customers. It affects everybody in a ripple effect.

Sadly, Dude is right. But it doesn't have to be tolerated, because it is not acceptable. We can at least try to respond, to try to restore some sense of appropriate justice to a bad situation.

If we try and fail to make an impact, at least we tried.

Marg
 
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