Always look on the bright side of life

The year started off quite bad. At least four robberies (a transport with money to a bank in Stockholm, a jeweler's shop in Södertälje, another transport with money to a bank in Huddinge and a bank in Täby) has taken place in and around Stockholm during the first ten days. Moreover a sports hall in Västergård, Södertälje, was burnt down (the cause of the fire is not yet clear), there has been another school shooting in the U.S. (this time less deadly than the one in Newtown in December), and the conflict in Syria is escalating and except for the horrors of the war itself people starve. I could go on and on with wars, conflicts, violence, starvation, etc but I think you see what I mean.

"Always look on the bright side of life" gets a quite bitter ring to it after these, and similar, events, but still there is something in it. We read all these negative news - and actually, it is almost as if "news" are defined as negative events. Positive news rarely reaches the first pages of newspapers. What does it turn us into when we see the society through the glasses of the negative events reported in media? To get a proper picture, there is also a need for news about things going in the right direction, be it international treaties that advance an issue, national changes in legislation or policies that have positive effects, or local improvements and positive examples. Often, I think, such news are considered less important, and some of them probably don't even qualify as "news".

As for myself, I know that I more often write a post about something that upsets me than about something that makes me happy. I can list a number of rational reasons for that - but at the end of the day my way of selecting what I write about confirms media's picture of what is importan. Thus, I will end this post with two positive news (one from December, which I never got time to write about when it appeared).

In December, the EU fisheries committee finally decided to make EU fisheries more sustainable after hard work by Swedish MEP Isabella Lövin and others - now it is the EU Parliament and the EU countries' fisheries ministers that have to transform the decision into law and practice. Commentary in DN here.

Suggestions from vice president Joe Biden for how the U.S. plan to curb gun violence will soon appear. Of course there are no easy solutions, and the perspective need to include not only guns and restrictions regarding them but also how to help people before they get so desperate that they plan shootings, in schools or other places. (SvD, DN)

I am well aware of that these two positive news are not final results in their respective fields - there is still a long way before they are implemented. In Europe, nations with strong interests in fisheries are likely to try to act against restrictions in fisheries, while in the U.S. the NRA has already made clear that they will try to prevent any new gun laws. But at least, these two have opened for changes that were formerly more or less unthinkable.

Obviously, there are others that also see the need for positive news. Here is a website which only add links to positive news (in Swedish), which I found through a friend when expressing my frustration regarding the recent news record.

The US gone mad

While the fireworks went mad outside the house I got some time to think about an article from today's newspaper. It is about free weapons training for teachers in Utah, which attracted hundreds of teachers (two hundred were admitted) in response to the latest school shooting in Newtown, which I have written about before, both in English and in Swedish. I also mentioned in the post yesterday (in Swedish) that one of my wishes for 2013 is that this year will bring changed gun laws in the USA so that the risk for children being shot down in schools will be reduced. I must say I was disappointed when I read this morning that instead teachers learn to handle guns to be able to open fire against people entering schools to shoot children and teachers. The world, or at least the US, must have gone mad! Do y ouwant to have war in the schools!? Do you expect people to feel comfortable because their children's teachers learn to handle guns - and bring these guns to school, and into the classrooms!? Do the teachers appreciate adding a new specialist field to their subjects: I teach history - and I am able to shoot anyone threatening my class?

In The Vancouver Sun one of the Utah gun instructors, Clark Aposhian, comments:

"Schools are some of the safest places in the world, but I think teachers understand that something has changed — the sanctity of schools has changed."

 It seems that Aposhian has not noticed that schools in the USA have not been particularly safe for some time due to the amount of guns available. School shootings are still rare, but the school shooting in Newtown was neither the first one, nor will it be the last if nothing is done to make it more difficult to access weapons for people in such despair that they want to inflict as much pain as possible to others. And hey, school shootings are not supposed to occur at all! Don't get too used to them, making they seem inevitable tragedies, because they are not. Furthermore, it seems Aposhian has not noticed that there might be some problems with teachers carrying weapons in schools. In USnews on NBC news the teacher Kerrie Anderson (stating herself being "pro-gun") observes some of the difficulties:

"How would I keep that gun safe?" she said. "I wouldn't carry (it) on my person while teaching, where a disgruntled student could overpower me and take it. And if I have it secured in my office, it might not be a viable form of protection."

Furthermore, more guns in the society will certainly increase gun related violence - how can more guns in schools be expected to decrease gun related violence? Children understand why it is not a good idea. When I talked to my kids, six and ten years old, about teachers having weapons training and the idea of teachers bringing guns to school they just stared at me. "Mom, we will never move to the US and go to school there, will we?", they asked. "Probably not", I told them. "Good", they replied. They did not say that when we talked about the Newtown school schooting, but when faced with the idea that there might be schools to which adults bring weapons, every day, to avoid new school shootings they had had enough. We do understand the frustration you face when people have been shot down without any chance to protect themselves. But you seldom solve problems of violence through violence, and least of all you reduce gun violence through adding guns. Children understand this. I thus repeat my wish for 2013:

Let 2013 be the year when the USA finally begins to move towards restricted availability of weapons to reduce the risk for school shootings. We've had enough of these tragedies!