Again<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve taken up vacation residence in Florida. We are ensconced in our camper, a few minutes from the beach. It\u2019s warm, it\u2019s \u2018chill\u2019; it\u2019s palm trees and sand. It\u2019s not the ice I slipped on Monday morning at home in Ohio, landing flat on my face (laughing).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I read a friend\u2019s Facebook post, asking what we can do about this crisis in America. This was one of many school shootings in 2018; it\u2019s only six weeks. There was the usual back and forth, degenerating to arming teachers and guards, the claim there\u2019s nothing that can be done, and personal attacks (my friend, a teacher, was warned not to advocate for his views in his classroom \u2013 I know he\u2019s far too good a teacher to do that.) I didn\u2019t chime in, it\u2019s a conversation we\u2019ve had so many times before I don\u2019t feel like there\u2019s much to add to that debate.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 Preamble to the United States Constitution<\/em><\/p>\n 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 \u201ca pass\u201d on this issue. It is the primary duty of a nation to protect its children. We cannot avoid dealing with this because it\u2019s too hard, or there\u2019s 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\u2019s that simple.<\/p>\n National crisis after crisis, we have had \u201cblue ribbon\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s my list of where to start. I\u2019ll save the most controversial (and most effective) until last.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As a former high school Dean of Students, it was a major part of my job to \u201cknow\u201d 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 \u00a0an 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\u2019t know what was happening. The school needs to recognize that not every \u201cdifferent\u201d kid is a threat, but that kids that feel \u201cdifferent\u201d can sometimes feel pushed to act. <\/em>Again, there are civil rights issues on the line, schools need personnel who can deal with those kids and those issues.<\/p>\n There is security to be considered. While we don\u2019t 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 \u201cgas on the fire\u201d approach \u2013 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.<\/p>\n And finally, the ultimate question: why is America the leading country for these kinds of attacks? I read a different friend\u2019s 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 \u201cfailures,\u201d from lacking school prayer, to video games, to working Moms. But other countries have all of those same \u201cflaws,\u201d yet absent political terrorists, don\u2019t have the same problem. What\u2019s missing, why don\u2019t they have massacres like the US? There IS an obvious answer.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s, when the weapons of World War I came back to the US in the form of \u201cTommy Guns\u201d 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 \u201cguards\u201d better, giving them more powerful weapons. It isn\u2019t working here, we aren\u2019t preventing the violence, the loss, and the sadness.<\/p>\n 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 2nd<\/sup> 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 sucks. We must begin, because we will certainly have to go through this again and again until we do.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sadly – here are links to the other essays I have written on this subject:<\/p>\n