He Said-TOPIC: School safety-We don’t have many options that will make a difference
To discuss a realistic solution to our school violence problem, we must first address the problem squarely in the eye.
Our children aren’t getting killed by fistfights in the hall. They aren’t getting murdered by baseball bats, or even knives.
The young children of this great nation are getting killed in school by guns. It’s almost a weekly occurrence.
If students were bringing a deadly poison to school and murdering their classmates, you can bet there would be such tight restriction on that poison you couldn’t buy it without the FBI knocking on your door. But guns are a different animal. When people are killed with guns, the general sentiment is to shrug, point to the flag, and say that’s the price of being an American.
This is what makes a serious battle against school violence nearly impossible. Any meaningful gun restrictions that might make a difference are out of the question.
That means we must search for alternative answers. The get-tough solution that has worked so well with DUI deaths is not an option.
When this nation was faced with its young adults getting killed in DUI traffic fatalities, it responded by raising the drinking age from 18 to 21. And it responded by lowering the blood-alcohol level required to be legally drunk behind the wheel. Not long ago .12 was considered legally drunk. Thankfully, that number has now been lowered to .08.
But instead of getting tough, gun activists have gone the other direction. They say the answer to our gun problem is more guns. Let people carry guns into bars. Let students and faculty members go armed on college campuses.
It would be like encouraging everyone to drive drunk in order to bring down the number of DUI fatalities.
Allowing faculty members to go armed would almost be tempting if you could convince me: 1) the students wouldn’t somehow get access to the guns (even if they’re locked in a drawer), and 2) the faculty members wouldn’t go off the deep end and use the guns themselves.
What we’re left with is a school safety system totally reliant on students tattling on their classmates if they suspect there’s a problem. It’s a system ‘ as we can all tell ‘ that’s painfully flawed.
Based on what we have left to choose from, I say our best bet is to make our schools like our courtrooms. You enter through one door with a metal detector, and backpacks are forbidden. If that’s the highest level of security people will tolerate, we need to reach that level.