Lives for sale
Ill-conceived raffle is shameful

Oops,The irony is appalling.

Less than three weeks after two New Orleans teenagers shot and wounded each other during a fight at their middle school, the Parent Teacher Organization at a prekindergarten through eighth grade school in Bastrop, La., decided to raffle a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun.

Hunting is a staple of life in Bastrop, about 15 miles from the Arkansas border. Children take hunting safety courses and go hunting with their parents on weekends.

Last year the PTO raffled a gun to help pay the bills of a Beekman school student’s mother who had cancer.
Roy McCoy, principal at Beekman, doesn’t see anything wrong with raffling a shotgun as a school fund raiser.

“As far as I am concerned, there is no issue,” McCoy said. “Our students hunt and fish. A whole lot of people are perfectly happy with it.”

And perhaps that’s the problem.

What’s even more disturbing is the tickets are $1 each and there is no mention of an age restriction for the raffle winner.

“That’s a major concern of ours,” said Million Mom March Southeast Regional director Jaquie Algee. “If a child in fourth grade purchased a ticket, he could be the winner of a shotgun. Then what?”

The gun the school is raffling is similar to one of the weapons used in the 1998 Jonesboro, Ark., school shooting in which four students and a teacher were gunned down by two schoolboys.

We, as a society, are quick to blame the ills of today’s youth on television, radio, etc., instead of looking at a more concrete answer to the problem.

Perhaps the answer is much simpler than we think. Maybe it’s the parents.
Ironically, we still haven’t been able to figure that out.