Now, before we get into this, I’d just like to state some simple facts:
Recently, the Clarksville School District’s superintendent attempted to arm 22 volunteers with small pistols concealed under their normal clothing. These volunteers were school staff members who has 53 hours of training.
Two of the most popular school safety strategies are the ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) program and your average lockdown strategy. ALICE, currently used in six Arkansas schools, recently came under fire for teaching kids to throw books, backpacks, pencils and so on at an attacker in order to slow an attacker down, or to put him at a disadvantage when the student charged the attacker. Keep these in mind while reading.
I believe we’ve all heard a lot about school shootings and how we can prevent them, and from both sides it’s always a chant of, “Think of the children,” but nobody really seems to have asked students how they feel about it. None that I can recall, anyway. Well, I’m here to bridge this possibly-nonexistent gap of the topic of school safety by telling you how I, a student of Searcy High School, feel about a variety of solutions suggested by a variety of people. The good, the bad, and the ugly, I will bare my soul about this topic for your reading pleasure.
1. Extra Armed Guards
This is a pretty common solution that a lot of people suggest. It’s a pretty simple concept and in theory, it does make sense: if we increase the amount of armed security in schools, we’ll have a higher chance of stopping a would-be shooter sooner. However, once you look at it through the eyes of a student, it gets kind of creepy. Assuming we’re talking armed guards that aren’t concealing their weapons or presence, it’d feel a lot like a miniature police state. Sure, we’re safe, but freedom feels lacking when there’s 20 armed people in your school, roaming the halls. We might as well tag the students like cattle, just to ensure they’re exactly where they need to be. All in all, the psychological impact of this solution would honestly make me uneasy at school.
2. Armed Personnel With Concealed Weapons
This one has less of a psychological impact in that it’d feel like my school had been turned into something from one of Orwell’s fever dreams, but more in that of a, “Did somebody trust this person with a weapon?” kind of way. I’ve been around teachers for going on 11 years now, and I’ve seen how they act. They make mistakes. They fumble, they forget the words, just like we all do. However, when you put a gun into a person’s hands, you have to expect a little more out of them than the average. How long ago were they trained? Do they perform regular maintenance on the gun? Who’s checking in on these people to make sure they’re ready if the time comes? The personnel trained in Clarksville received 53 hours worth of training, while the average cop in Los Angeles receives 113. Are these people sufficiently trained to where we can trust them with such a responsibility?
3. Blame The Video Games
This one isn’t so much a solution as people pointing to something and saying, “There’s the reason people are shooting up schools!” In particular, video games. Awhile back, NRA spokesperson Wayne LaPierre claimed that video games were part of a “callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people.” If I may, I’d like to say that’s pretty much completely wrong. Just because a person plays violent video games, that does not mean they themselves are violent. If anything, it’s a release. However, there are a lot of kids that learned 99 percent of what they know about guns from video games, movies, and TV.
I know it’s kind of foreign to think about somebody like that, as we live in a state where a good amount of people are introduced and instructed on how to use firearms at an early age, but it’s a reality in a good part of America. My proposed solution: a gun education course, given around the fourth or fifth grade. You need to teach these kids that a gun is a tool made by man that is very, very powerful. You need to teach them that in their hands they hold a piece of technology that has gave rise to new civilizations and toppled empires, put food on the table and people in the ground. These kids need to understand that when they pull that trigger, it was most definitely carry consequences with it. It’s not like Call of Duty or Halo where when you kill your friend, you joke about it and he vows to get you back next time. They need to understand that they have the power to kill with that in their hands, and with that power comes incredibly great responsibility.
4. Gun Control
Just like the first one, it’s a basic concept: if there’s no guns, nobody can kill each other with them. In places like South Korea and Japan, where kids play all the violent video games they want and never go on a killing spree, there’s some pretty strict and extensive gun control in place. If you are intent on getting a gun in these countries, you obviously can, but it’s not as simple as just going to the gun store with your ID and buying one, kind of like an illegal drug. Likewise, if anybody in America was just absolutely dedicated to getting a kilo of coke, they probably could, but they’d have to jump through all sorts of hoops. The same applies to guns: criminals will still be able to get them if they’re determined, but there’ll be so many barriers in place they may just give up on it and find another way.
On the flipside, I personally don’t feel comfortable just relinquishing my right to bear arms like that. I understand the desire to keep such a powerful thing away from somebody with a mental disease or something similar, but the ways people have proposed to do so makes me uneasy. To be honest, I don’t think anybody will be really happy with the solution we come up with in the end.
5. More Lockdown Training
This concept is, again, pretty simple: for a good long while kids didn’t practice locking down a classroom or something similar, and may be completely at a loss if the time came when they needed to know. Like a fire or tornado drill, these things can and will happen at some point, and we need to prepare for them. However, a lot of people are arguing over what kind of strategy to teach the kids in case of an attacker, and all I’ll say is this: I understand that the rules may be vastly different for kids in grade or middle school, but I’m in high school. Those in my class are getting pretty close to physically maturing, enough so we’re always stuck with the heavy-lifting jobs that pay minimum wage. I’m not saying I’d just instantly go gung ho on a guy with a gun, but, if it came down to it, I’d rather die fighting than begging for my life.
So, what do we do? It’s pretty obvious that we can’t just not do anything, but anything we can do seems to be a bad way to go. And, honestly, if you’re looking here for answers, you’re in the wrong place. I am just as, or more, clueless than you are when it comes to this topic. Obviously, we need to restrict access to firearms to certain people. But the tools the government would need to do this would be both powerful and susceptible to abuse, which is why I really wouldn’t trust the government with them. This is pretty sad. We’re working with a loose, bumpy, and problematic foundation, and we won’t be able to do much of anything constructive until we sort these problems out. Until that’s done, we shouldn’t be pointing fingers at this and that, blaming them for horrible tragedies.
