Again

Again

We’ve taken up vacation residence in Florida. We are ensconced in our camper, a few minutes from the beach. It’s warm, it’s ‘chill’; it’s palm trees and sand. It’s not the ice I slipped on Monday morning at home in Ohio, landing flat on my face (laughing).

But the reality of America found its way here to our little paradise. Yesterday, about a hundred miles away, seventeen kids and teachers were killed and fifteen more wounded in another school shooting. There were heroes, including a football coach who threw himself in front of the kids, teachers who followed the plan, and kids who led others to safety. And there was the deranged shooter, again.

I read a friend’s Facebook post, asking what we can do about this crisis in America. This was one of many school shootings in 2018; it’s only six weeks. There was the usual back and forth, degenerating to arming teachers and guards, the claim there’s nothing that can be done, and personal attacks (my friend, a teacher, was warned not to advocate for his views in his classroom – I know he’s far too good a teacher to do that.) I didn’t chime in, it’s a conversation we’ve had so many times before I don’t feel like there’s much to add to that debate.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. – Preamble to the United States Constitution

The Preamble outlines what the national government should do. Past improving of our Union, the next three goals: establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for common defense require us to do more than take “a pass” on this issue. It is the primary duty of a nation to protect its children. We cannot avoid dealing with this because it’s too hard, or there’s too much conflict in the Second Amendment, or we are too politically divided on so many other issues. We must protect our children, we must keep them from becoming targets and outlets for the deranged. It’s that simple.

National crisis after crisis, we have had “blue ribbon” commissions to determine what went wrong, and what we can do differently. Those commissions have had an impact: note that the 911 Commission helped put in place policies that have protected us from similar attacks for the past seventeen years. How can this NOT be a national crisis, demanding our best come forward to propose resolutions.

Here’s my list of where to start. I’ll save the most controversial (and most effective) until last.

We must do a better job of taking care of the mentally ill. Event after event, we find that the perpetrators were somehow deranged, and that they were known to mental health professionals. It isn’t that the professionals failed, but that we as a society must empower them to do their job better. It means more money, more people involved, and a willingness to recognize that mental health is a public health crisis. We have no problem quarantining those with highly contagious diseases, we need to look at how we can find those who are dangerously mentally ill before they get the opportunity to prove it. There are serious civil rights issues involved, we must balance rights and responsibilities.

Schools have an obligation as well. As the front line in dealing with students, schools often know where potential problems are. In the most recent case, students were somehow not surprised who the shooter was; several said that, if there was going to be a shooter, he was the most likely. The school administration should have known the same. This also requires money, time, and personnel.

As a former high school Dean of Students, it was a major part of my job to “know” the school, to be able to have a read on students, and to keep lines of communications open to every faction of kids. When something was wrong, when someone was threatening or quietly demanding attention, that connection gave students access to  an adult who could do something about it. This is the lesson learned from Columbine: the shooters were planning the attack for a year, and literally had a page in the yearbook. School administrators didn’t know what was happening. The school needs to recognize that not every “different” kid is a threat, but that kids that feel “different” can sometimes feel pushed to act. Again, there are civil rights issues on the line, schools need personnel who can deal with those kids and those issues.

There is security to be considered. While we don’t want our kids to go to school in armed fortresses, we do need to do a better job of securing our kids. Yesterday the National Security Administration headquarters was attacked by a car trying to breach the entrance, three were injured, shots fired. The car was stopped and those involved taken into custody. While we cannot guard our kids as tightly as we do our national secrets, and we cannot expect or want our schools to be fortresses, what more can be done to protect them? I do not advocate arming teachers or patrolling schools with semi-automatic weapons. Introducing more deadly weapons into the school environment seems to be a “gas on the fire” approach – what happens when the next shooter is a guard or a teacher? But there are reasonable measures that schools can take to try to protect their kids.

And finally, the ultimate question: why is America the leading country for these kinds of attacks? I read a different friend’s Facebook post claiming that it is not the inanimate object (the gun) but a failure in American values. There is a laundry list of American “failures,” from lacking school prayer, to video games, to working Moms. But other countries have all of those same “flaws,” yet absent political terrorists, don’t have the same problem. What’s missing, why don’t they have massacres like the US? There IS an obvious answer.

President Obama (my more conservative readers just clicked off) said that he would talk about guns every time there was a shooting, until America realized it was time to do something about it. In the 1920’s, when the weapons of World War I came back to the US in the form of “Tommy Guns” and the like, the police were outgunned by the criminals. We did something about it; we outlawed the automatic weapons. Today we are taking the approach that we should simply arm the “guards” better, giving them more powerful weapons. It isn’t working here, we aren’t preventing the violence, the loss, and the sadness.

We are at an intersection of fear and money. Fear, often generated by those who have the most financial incentive, that we will lose our 2^nd Amendment rights and our freedom by increased control of guns. Money, buying the political influence to keep arming our citizens with sophisticated weapons of war and profiting from their sales. We must reach some agreement that our children are at least a part of this equation, they have been left out so far.

We need a National Commission to take a hard look at what we are doing. We need to attack this issue on multiple fronts, including reducing the availability of weaponry. We need to start. Why: because a Nation that cannot protect its children – sucks. We must begin, because we will certainly have to go through this again and again until we do.

 

Sadly – here are links to the other essays I have written on this subject:

It’s Not About Hunting

False Outrage

Guns and Sadness