Gun Violence Will Still Have Students in the Crosshairs in 2023
With 2023 two months old, news came down from Virginia of a horrific school shooting. A six-year-old brought his mom’s gun to school and shot his teacher, nearly killing her. Then Michigan State University: 3 dead, five injured. Seven K-12 school shootings resulting in injury or death through Feb 26. History has taught us that this will not be the last use of a gun in a school, nor the end of targeting teachers.
Violence will continue to plague our K-12, Higher Ed campuses throughout the year. According to the Washington Post, 338,000 students have been exposed to armed violence at school since 1999. Gun-level events are the most lethal but rarest manifestation of school insecurity. Every day, kids and staff are subjected to mental, emotional, and physical threats and attacks from multiple fronts.
In-person. Online social media. Phones. The daily tribulations of anti-social, oppositional—even criminal--behavior, impede educational progress, and harm the school environment. One incident in one classroom or hallway can reverberate schoolwide. The disrespect, the threats, the shakedowns, the stabbings, the thefts, the assaults, the bullying all sit simmering on the back burner as the left and right fight it out over gun control. Progressives and liberals believe gun control will make schools safe, but then advocate and implement negative discipline policies indifferent to victims of daily serious misbehaviors. Sympathizing with the perpetrators who victimize individuals and even an entire school only encourage violent acts. Conservatives support harder discipline for safety infractions and other forms of school discipline violations, yet they fight tooth-and-nail gun reforms that potentially would mitigate the frequency and severity of active shooters on school campuses.
We need to cleave off the gun control of the Left and the stronger discipline of the Right; add comprehensive interagency cooperation among law enforcement, mental and other social services, with new approaches for proactive monitoring and early intervention, we just might gain control of the scourge mass shootings and school assaults represent. The two present a dangerous synergy producing thousands of physical and mental casualties in schools. We have not addressed the problem effectively.
There is some shared ground, but don’t expect terre firma walking it.The Left and Right both see a shooter’s mental, emotional status as significant. That’s where it ends. The conservatives close their eyes to the reality that most perps arm themselves with an inventory close to a small country. I guess they’re okay with unstable, volatile Rambos possessing such firepower. The Left believes strongly in mental services and gun control—a good start. They also want to defund law and get PDs, SROs out of schools, leaving them defenseless and attack-friendly, from intruders to cafeteria riots. Uvalde and Parkwood were law enforcement failure, but if the lesson learned is the Left’s police and security purge for guidance counselors and therapy sessions, or the Right’s arming teachers, remedial help in understanding the subject is needed.
One more thing. More important than legislation, more powerful than an impassioned speech, more transforming than alchemy, more difficult to change than a closed mind. But reducing school and campus gun deaths and other violent acts won’t happen without it. An upcoming Green B Letter feature will tell you what’s missing from the gun debate, so vital to school safety.