When
WauwatosaNow disclosed that five school administrators
received gun training last month, I wondered why it took a month to break the story.
Maybe it would have been too controversial in March, before the mass murders at Virginia Tech.
I asked my daughter what she thought about the shootings and about the notion of letting people carry guns in schools for protection. “It’s a really dumb idea to have guns in schools,” she said. When I pressed her about the conversations kids were having, she said “some people think one thing and others thing the other and nobody’s changing anybody else’s mind.” She thought for a minute and said “I suppose you could get them to change if you held a gun to them.”
Sometimes, gallows humor is all we've got.
Following the shootings of Amish school children by a deranged stranger from the nearby Pennsylvania community last year, Wisconsin Representative Frank Lasee said "To make our schools safe for our students to learn, all options should be on the table. Israel and Thailand have well-trained teachers carrying weapons and keeping their children safe from harm. It can work in Wisconsin."
Of course, Wauwatosa isn’t in Israel or Thailand. We’re not “waging a bloody fight with Muslim separatists” as Thailand is, and it turns out that security officers, not teachers, guard the schools in violence-torn Israel.
Here, gun violence in the schools is rare. It usually originates right inside the school. Even so, school is the safest place for kids to be, statistically speaking. If we want to keep our kids safe, we’d do better to keep them out of cars than out of the classroom.
A report from
the Kansas State Department of Education summarized findings from a Secret Service analysis of 37 school shootings. Only one finding argues for arming administrators or teachers: most events are brief (around two minutes) and end before police arrive.
The rest of the findings suggest that the real preparation schools need isn’t weapons training but paying better attention to kids. Among the findings:
-Shootings are virtually always planned: the shooters don’t just snap. Most have targets in mind.
-Almost all attackers had already been identified as showing disturbing behavior, but the adults didn’t investigate.
-Most attackers had told someone what they were going to do. Those who knew didn’t tell others but egged the attackers on.
-The most frequent motivation was revenge against those who tormented or bullied them. Failure, humiliation, and loss of love were also factors.
-It was easy for kids to get guns.
That's the thing about guns: they're easy. When you have them around, diplomacy and conversation just don't seem, well, efficient.
And by the time you undo the safety, it's already too late to be safe.
