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| It's for the children. |
Turning our schools into prisons would have many benefits. Students would not be able to play hookey any more, ditching school after lunch and running off to do who knows what. Fights and bullying would be instantly detected and quelled. Riots and gang fights inside schools would be a thing of the past. Everyone would be able to learn in the calm security that comes with the rigid oversight of a police state.
And then we could all relax. Ahh.
Or maybe we could not allow the rare actions of severely mentally-ill individuals to spin all 300+ million of us up into paroxysms of rage against one another and stop legislating from 6-standard-deviations-out-from-normal events.
Nah. This is so much more fun. By all means, let's arm teachers, build walls, frisk students, abolish the second amendment, confiscate all guns, send everyone to firearms training and, above all, scream at each other.
If you don't want to do all of these things and more, you have the blood of children on your hands.
The horrible thing is, I actually heard someone interviewed on the radio say, without any trace that they were anything other than perfectly serious, "We need to make schools more secure, like airports and prisons."
ReplyDeleteGah.
I am more of the opinion that the way to reduce the number of school shootings is, first, to not essentially turn the shooters into celebrities. Just have the news that it happened, same as you might for people killed in building fires (3,362 deaths in 2015) or by being struck by lightning (39 in 2016), and move on. In comparison, while an average of 23 people killed in schools per year since 2012 is obviously not nothing, it doesn't seem like it deserves vastly more attention than the equally-numerous lightning deaths. Especially since, unlike lightning strikes, talking about school shootings all the time actually seems to make them more likely because of all the copycats.
Of course, it would be a good idea to take some notice of whether someone is clearly planning something and take measures to stop them. But this is more in the nature of noticing when you are walking outside and your hair starts to stand on end, and heading for a ditch to avoid being the tallest thing standing. Reasonable response to a specific threat is one thing, complete overhaul of society to prevent a low-probability event is another.
(I don't personally know anyone who has been shot in a non-war situation. I do know a couple of people who have been struck by lightning, though. Including me, if I stretch the definition of "struck" a bit - I got a secondary shock from piping in the milking parlor when our barn was hit. So, I'm actually more concerned about lightning strikes than about being shot.)
Amen, brother. It always seems odd to me that some event in suburban Florida means that the people in rural Montana need to change everything.
ReplyDeleteWait, what?
Thing is, the conclusion "we have to make schools more secure" is absolutely correct-- if we are going to insist on making them weapon-free zones.
ReplyDeleteYou can't have both an area where nobody but the cops can have so much as a pocket knife and not have courthouse-level security, it's like leaving a pile of cash in front of your big, sliding, glass door and putting a sign that says "gone, back in six weeks."
Looking at the school attacks...it went from horrible but understandable stuff like "guy flipped out over bad result in college, killed all professors involved and then himself" to "guys plant multiple bombs* using terror tactics to shoot up their high school." When the result was to further disarm...we now have crazies that just walk in and manage it, and the crazies who think ahead can walk back out of the place after the shoot whoever they wanted.
The whole "disarm the schools" experiment has failed. Really bad.
* folks always forget that about Columbine. They had bombs in the lunch room, bombs to distract the cops, and I think there were bombs to get first responders, too. The lunch room bombs didn't go off, and they didn't get a chance to trigger then first-responder bombs.