United Liberty
How Many Kids Had a Choice in Writing Letters Asking Obama to Ban Guns?
Wed, 01/16/2013 - 6:11pm | posted by George Scoville
Apropos of a bunch of stories floating around today about all the letters the president has received from the nation’s children, asking him to do something about gun violence, and against the backdrop of a piece I wrote for The Dangerous Servant about how reprehensible it is for educators to foist personal political agendas on captive children, it’s worth asking: how may kids who sent a letter to the president asking him to solve a gun violence issue sent their letter because they wanted to, and not because some Democratic candidate-supporting teacher union goon forced the kid to do so?
What do you think? Sound off in the comments….
We are treading dangerously into Conspiracy Theory territory here.
Frankly, I’m fine with taking this as genuine.
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. It’s not that far-fetched. Kids are smart, but when they’re that young they don’t really understand exactly what has transpired, much less the role of public policy. Someone had to talk to them about it, and that someone is likely a Democrat and a member of a teacher’s union.
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George Scoville
Twitter: @stackiii
I don’t know. I think kids are smart enough to digest the fact that some freaking idiot came into a school and killed 20 six year olds and six adults.
But do they understand the gravity? Why it’s tragic? Our politics? Our cultural historical legacy of firearms?
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George Scoville
Twitter: @stackiii
What I’m driving at is that I think the letters were genuine too, but genuine insofar as their teachers, from whom they cannot escape or get alternate sources of information, laid out the issue landscape for them. That’s worth thinking about, now or any time.
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George Scoville
Twitter: @stackiii
I’m surprised they didn’t have the kids break out in a few verses of the creepy Obama worship song we heard during the campaigns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI-BCbKuJGA
Kids are captives of the education system. Sometimes it actually benefits them, but more often they’re exposed to whatever political leanings the teacher wants to inflict on them.
George has a very good point. Back when I was in first grade, I went to a Catholic school. My teacher had me and the other kids in my class write letters because “people were throwing babies into garbage cans”. I can’t remember who we addressed them to, but you know when this was? Right after Roe v. Wade was decided. We were used as pawns in a political debate that we didn’t understand. When I realized that later on, as a young adult, I was sorely *PISSED* about it, and I still am.
Are they smart enough to know the dangers of exploiting a tragedy to pursue political ends? Smart enough to know that sometimes something as simple as a facebook or twitter post/pic can scar your future chances for advancement and careers?
Are they smart enough to understand the fate of groups that willingly gave up their means of self-defense? Are they smart enough to know the phrase “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away”?
When have you ever heard of any child writing any politician on their own? Child abuse takes many forms, all the more insidious when adults make excuses for it.
“freaking idiot”? Really, that’s how you describe the criminally insane? And that’s what you believe is in the minds of 6-10 year old children, “digesting”? The boy’s mother was a teacher and his father is a successful, wealthy lawyer… so he’s an idiot. Your first sentence was the only intelligent thing you said and you should have quit there.
You must be kidding Mataconis. You really think a bunch of 8 year olds are going to come up with the idea of writing to the President about gun control? They probably got the idea, then, from the unicorns that they take to school with them. Sheesh.
I don’t think it’s conspiracy theory stuff at all. We’ve seen plenty of instances where school kids have been dragooned to demonstrate at the State House or to write advocacy letters. The education industry is full of Liberal wannabee activists. It’s not a stretch at all to do an assignment and have a few teachers only forward on the letters they agree with, even if they grade the assignment fairly (which I doubt.) No conspiracy. There is plenty of Liberal Enemies who think more or less alike.
Really? When I was in first grade at a Catholic school, my teacher told the class that people were throwing babies into trash cans and our assignment was to write a letter about that. The year? 1973. Does that year strike a bell with anyone? Roe v. Wade? Yeah, we were used as pawns in the public debate about abortion. When I was old enough to realize what happened, I got pissed about it, and I’m *STILL* pissed.
Quite bluntly I have seen this used countless times before where teachers have used their captive audience and made a school project out of sending letters to support a political agenda the children had no knowledge of.
The kids that were on stage yesterday, while the POTUS was speaking, had no idea why they were there. They looked very bored; however, very well mannered. I truly believe the teachers, with a little help from their “politcal friends,” had each kid write a letter and the ones that she/he deemed were good enough, were the ones that got sent. I have actually seen this happen before; teachers have complete control over these kids during the day and they will do whatever she/he tells them to do. Plain and simple. Maybe we should look a little closer, when a mother states that she is afraid of her own son….maybe that’s when the courts or the law should step in and worry a little more about a psycho kid, and why the mother is buying weapons that are not kept under lock and key, instead of worrying about legally registered gun owners who do not have reports of psycho kids and keep their weapons under lock and key and away from children! The political idiots have lost all concept as to what is happening here and not concentrating on the real issues…the people who are creating these travesties! Do a better job of looking at the people; not the weapons.
So basically the kids had a figurative gun pointed at their heads when they wrote those letters….color me unsurprised
What popped into my mind upon seeing those kids with Obama as his propaganda props was that shaking, scared to death little boy sitting with Saddam Hussein as Saddam pontificated about how much he just loved children. (After all, as the Democrats say,isn’t this all”For the CHILdren”?)…………….Using kids for political/Socialist propaganda demonstrates the level of perfidy of which this Obama person is capable.
You are so right; using them as puppets for their own glorification! So wrong!
Just think of how many letters might have been written if those kids’ brothers and sisters had not been victims of abortion.
In an era where even playing cowboys and Indians, or pointing a finger and saying “bang” gets you suspended, fewer kids are going to write class essays saying they like guns than would have a century ago, but not because they no longer like guns.
My guess — which is as good as any of the uninformed guesses posted on this page, including the original post — is that the vast majority of children would prefer there to be fewer guns in the world, not more. These ‘write the President’ assignments are not at all unusual; my son recently had a similar assignment given to him. But in that assignment, he was expected to select his issue, develop his position, support his position, and write his own letter. The assumption that these kids were forced into adopting a position they do not believe in is unfair to the kids and their teachers. It also assumes that parents are not paying attention to what is going on in school, when in fact in most schools you’d have parents lined up outside the principal’s office if their kids had been forced into advocating a particular agenda.
I’m not saying the assignments are unusual, and I’m not even saying the kids don’t believe the things they write. What I’m saying is that kids’ realities on this issues are likely to be informed by a monolithic, progressive Democratic worldview.
Tell me: when reading mail on Capitol Hill, why do you think all the letters are about saving the environment, and never one about cutting taxes?
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George Scoville
Twitter: @stackiii
Yes, but the framing of the issue is what’s important.
If you say to a kid, do you want to get rid of guns so the bad guys won’t have guns, they will say yes. However, if you say, do you want to make sure that the good guys have guns to protect people if the bad guys show up, they will say yes to that.
Given that a majority of people in this country are generally okay with private gun ownership, I would expect that a truly impartial sampling of children’s opinions would generate a large number of letters that say, I want my daddy to be able to protect us if a bad guy comes around.
But: what kind of fool takes advice from children on complex issues anyway? The responsible approach is to leave the decision-making in the hands of the adults. Publicizing letters from kids is just emotional manipulation, pure and simple.
“Your guess”, based on what? The gun culture in this country is as strong or stronger than any time in our history. More women and kids are involved than ever before. Beyond that, studies have proven children, young boys in particular, have a fascination with guns that is not easilly discouraged and best treated with familiarization and education. Boys who are overprotected and sheltered by their liberal mothers and not allowed to play with toy guns will come up with their own ways of simulating guns. You argument about rather they were forced into adopting a position is rather pointless as well. There is no need for them to force any position. They simply give the “write the president assignment” then cherry pick a few from the kids of liberal parents who have been poisoned against guns and ignore the ones from better educated and adjusted kids. I would also like to see the demographics of where those letters that were accepted came from. You won’t find many country boys writing crap like that. They’re more likely from dysfunctional crime ridden cities. My twelve year old son has been shooting since he was five, and I dare say he knows a lot more about guns, our rights as citizens to have them, and the safe and responsible handling of them than most of his teachers and certainly more than our president and the liberal tools in the media.
It’s not new. I had a gradeschool teacher give my class an assignment to write a letter to President Carter. Those of us who wrote critical letters were told to do it again, and say something nice. Anything about the failing economy or the IRAN hostage crisis had to be removed.
It’s not just whether they had a choice to write Obama or not, or whether they had a choice about what to say, or that certain letters might have been sent and others not.
It’s that the idea the one should write to the PRESIDENT is foisted on the kids as if it’s the most obvious destination in the world. Why not the governor? Why not their district state rep?
The idea that something that happens everywhere means it needs to be addressed at the highest level of government possible is ridiculous. The 50 states are everywhere, and they’re perfectly capable of deciding what their regional and cultural situation is, and how best to protect their people. The one-size-fits-all idiocy of federal intervention on every. frakkin’. issue. in. our. lives. is INSANE.
But all the president has to do is say “we have a national problem!” and somehow — even if that’s true — a public translates that into “ergo, the best place to resolve it is the federal.” It’s rank idiocy.
Yes. Public education shouldn’t be politicized. Encouraging children to write to the President (or any politician) is a political act, because it assumes that political engagement is the right response to a given situation.
It would be appropriate (at a high enough grade level) to discuss the act of writing to a politician as a possible response to something. But, even then, to avoid politicizing the classroom the discussion would have to include other kinds of responses (including no response at all).
I suspect that many teachers have simply adopted the political activist model as the default response to any situation they regard as important, without even realizing that it is a political act. Or perhaps, in some cases, they don’t think politicization of the classroom is a problem so long as the “correct” political stance is taken.
good question. I don’t know, lets find out. someone want to do some…ah…’reporting?’
PROPaganda as Michelle Malkin put it.
Next up: Kids send letters to Obama telling him not to saddle them with onerous government debt for their entire lives. May be too late.
So? If enough parents ask their kids what happened, we can find out and stop speculating. It wouldn’t surprise me a whole lot to find out that a suddenly popular English assignment was to “write a letter to President Obama about why we need gun control,” but it’s pointless to speculate when we can find out for sure.
As a former school administrator, I can attest to the disgusting manner in which portions of our staff behaved. Many were blatant in their desire to break kids of conservative, independent or libertarian views. One administrator—during a meeting!—asked us to devise ways to more subtly insinuate the progressive agenda in the classroom.
I could believe, without pause, that teachers might lead students to conclusions and encourage them to write these sorts of letters, even if it is against the values that the child’s family have instilled in him or her.
Heck, when I was in school my teacher had us all practicing transcendental meditation. I didn’t know what it was at the time, since I was seven or eight, and since Mom and Dad sent me to school it couldn’t have been bad, right?
Well, my kid’s high school teachers would cut classes and try to rally the kids to protest the Iraq war, sadly, most of the students went to protest except for my kids, who supported me, as I was military. Even worse was how the school’s administration, local media and democrat politicians endorsed this indoctrination, inexcusable! I also saw the same sort of democrat indoctrination occur in my son’s grade school class during the Clinton/Dole election, where the teacher, at an military base school, essentially ran a campaign for Clinton in her classroom. So yes, our schools have become nothing more than left-wing democrat indoctrination centers, thanks in a large part to the unions. I’ve even experienced this bias myself in college courses, particularly English classes. Anymore, if you don’t know the politics of your teacher, and they seem to be an honest and responsible sort, then they’re probably conservative. I could go on with even more stories of my kids education, like where the school blocked the military recruiters, or my son’s battle with his idiot English teacher whom he consistently outsmarted as she was not at all well read, but I’ve posted far too long already.
I think the simple question here is, were the children manipulated to help push the presidents agenda? Was is due to the teachers unions being under the influence of the administration? Of course they were. I myself have been assigned an essay of similar intent that I didn’t understand and cared little about at the time but had to do it because the teacher said so.
When people are asked to prepare an overview of any kind, most of them apply for the help. They can only wish to have that brain of pros. The thing is their thinking is quite unstable and frustrated. They can hardly intend to ponder over writing personal statements again. As a result the life of such men and women becomes complicated, as it is a standard procedure there.
Overall, Ryan’s speech was a homerun, whether you like him or not. It was effective and independents who may be on the fence may have been won over. Ryan was convincing, articulate, and treated book editing those watching like adults. That’s what people really want and need to hear.
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Wealthy lawyer… so he’s an idiot. Your first sentence was the only intelligent homework paper thing you said and you should have quit there.
President about gun control? They probably got the idea, then, from Kendra M the unicorns that they take to school with them. Sheesh.
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