Category: Gun Control

Trying to Imagine

One of my favorite Chicago Tribune columnists, Heidi Stevens, wrote a moving piece on the Abundant Life Christian School Shooting this week.  She focused on the contrast of schoolchildren in their holiday pajamas being escorted from a crime scene. Her refrain, “I’m trying to imagine…,” repeatedly hammers home the senselessness of these avoidable tragedies. Two lines particularly hit home for me:

I’m trying to imagine what it would take for policymakers to stop wasting their time and ours arguing about trans athletes or what parts of U.S. history can be taught or whether rainbow flags are allowed in classrooms or whether dictionaries (dictionaries!) should be allowed in school libraries and start doing the hard, morally imperative work of protecting kids from guns, their No. 1 killer.

I’m trying to imagine how in the world we continue to justify this setup. (chicagotribune.com)

But there is no way to justify this set-up. “Thoughts and prayers” do not stop the shootings. They do not protect schoolchildren from frightening live shooter drills that unfortunately remain necessary. They do not repair the trauma students face, especially those who’ve endured such fear both in public school and again in college.

And not to be too gloomy, but this is only one of the pressing issues plaguing schools today.

Free public education serves not only students and their families – it is the path to an informed citizenry with self-efficacy. But schools struggled to meet that need before the pandemic, and they generally haven’t become more successful since. We know much of what we need to do. Why do we settle for failure?

What would a 2025 that showed progress for schools and their communities look like? So many changes are overdue. I used to tell my students that “If I ruled the world” – getting groans aplenty – what I would do in situations. I don’t rule the world, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting things to improve.

My initial 2025 Education Wishlist, in no particular order, no doubt missing some important pieces:

  • Gun control/keeping kids safe
  • Support for students: mental health, behavioral issues, attendance problems
  • Support for teachers dealing with the above
  • A continuing and even greater shift to student-centered classrooms with hands-on learning
  • Focus on critical thinking and lifelong learning
  • A continued emphasis on STEM skills without displacing the Humanities
  • Communities within schools
  • Communities that support their schools and respect their teachers
  • Positive [not overbearing] parental involvement
  • Removing the culture wars from education and focusing on real learning

With gratitude to Heidi Stevens, I’m trying to imagine a country where we summon the will to make these changes, hard and time-consuming though they will be. I’m trying to imagine a world where teaching and learning thrive in an environment free of fear. I’m trying to imagine an American people who care enough to make that happen.

Again

Again. Again and again and again.

I’ve written about this before and didn’t expect to be writing about it again. But it happened again, and it will keep happening.

A week ago, a troubled 14-year-old boy shot and killed four people in a public school. Nine others were wounded and hospitalized. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation director, he used an AR-platform weapon. The shooting is at least the 45th school shooting in 2024 and the deadliest this year, according to a CNN analysis. (cnn.com)

In tragedies like these, it is important to note that even the survivors and their loved ones are traumatized. “As students huddled, they called and texted each other and their parents. More than a few sent what they feared would be farewells.” (apnews.com) The aftermath will haunt them, as it has haunted others.

Since school shootings have become increasingly common, schools have resorted to active shooter drills. They are trying to keep students safe, but these drills have their own unintended consequences. “Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill.” (everytownresearch.org) A Pew Research Center survey finds that 57% percent of US teens reported in 2018 that they were worried a shooting could happen at their school, with one in four being “very worried.” (cnn.com2) “If you enter the school system as a 3-year-old, and you exit as an 18-year-old, you will have done 60 lockdown drills,” Robert Murtfeld, a parent in New York advocating for the new law, told Chalkbeat . (thehill.com) Is this what we want for our children? Don’t they deserve better?

The Republican response, once again, turns to thoughts and prayers, not policies and actions. J.D. Vance called school shootings “a fact of life,” as if they are unavoidable.  Trump says, ““These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster,” conveniently ignoring the root causes and government’s inaction. (nytimes.com) Those comments are only marginally better than his reaction to the Perry, Iowa, school shooting: “It’s just horrible – so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it. We have to move forward.” (theguardian.com)  Try telling that to the victims’ families, to the survivors, to a community in shock. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen?

Senator Raphael Warnock offered a very different response: “JD Vance claims that this kind of random, routine carnage is a fact of life. No, it’s not. It’s a fact of American life. This, again, is a tragic form of American exceptionalism.” (thehill.com2)

Warnock is not wrong about this unfortunate kind of exceptionalism. The United States has more school shootings than other industrialized nation. According to a CNN analysis published in 2018, in the previous nine years, the United States had about 57 times as many school shootings as Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom combined. (cnn2) According to federal data, a record 188 school shootings occurred during the 2021-22 academic year alone. More than 357,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the1999 Columbine High School shooting. (youthtoday.org)

Guns continue to be the leading cause of death for US children and teens since surpassing car accidents in 2020. (cnn.com3) Yet we continue to do nothing more than offer empty words. Jen Rubin says that the new technique of “prosecuting people related to the shooter deflects from the grotesque public policy failure: ready access to such weapons. Treating these incidents as individual crimes, with a subsequent search for a specific person to blame, allows the real culprits — the gun lobby and the weak-kneed Second Amendment absolutists, as well as the hyper-partisan Supreme Court — off the hook.” (washingtonpost.com)

While school shootings “represent a small sliver of the number of gun deaths, but they comprise a huge share of the psychological toll gun violence takes on us, especially younger Americans.” And taking steps to curb school shootings, like red flag laws, storage requirements, better background checks, and banning assault weapons, have the potential to reduce all gun deaths. Isaac Saul, editor of the Tangle newsletter, says it well: “We cannot solve gun violence with a single change. This will require a holistic societal fix. We need to better enforce the laws we have on the books. We need to support new laws that allow family and friends to easily flag warning signs to law enforcement. We need more robust mental health treatment (for teenagers, especially young men). We need gun ownership and training to be more like using a car and less like shopping at Wal-Mart. We need our politicians and celebrities and cultural leaders to treat gun ownership as a grave, monumental responsibility, not one to be flaunted or flexed.” (readtangle.com)

Our November election has become a wide-ranging referendum. If we want our children to feel safe in school, to be safe in school, we have a party ready to tackle gun safety. The time is now. It’s up to us to make this happen.

Stop The Insanity!

The insanity continues. School shootings continue to threaten our students, and we know ways to reduce the danger. Arming teachers must not be one of them.

According to an Education Week analysis, there have been 14 school shootings this year that resulted in injuries or deaths, with 196 such shootings since 2018. There were 38 school shootings with injuries or deaths in 2023, 51 in 2022, 35 in 2021, 10 in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018. (edweek.org) Firearms are now the number one cause of death for children in the United States. (forbes.com) “The child firearm mortality rate has doubled in the U.S. from a recent low of 1.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2013 to 3.7 in 2021.” (kff.org) No other similarly large and wealthy nation has firearm mortality in its top four causes. [Ibid.] Guns surpassed car accidents as the leading cause four years ago. (cnn.com)

Everytown Research & Policy proposes a two-part plan that they say will foster safe and nurturing schools, address violence at its earliest stages, and block easy access to firearms by those who would do harm. First, they want to prevent shooters from getting access to guns by enacting sensible laws, including secure firearm storage laws and practices; enacting “Extreme Risk laws, so that law enforcement and family members can act on warning signs of violence and temporarily prevent access to firearms; raising the age to purchase semi-automatic firearms to 21; and requiring background checks on all gun sales so that minors and people with dangerous histories can’t evade gun laws.” They also propose solutions that “empower educators and law enforcement to intervene to address warning signs of violence, to provide the support that students in crisis need, and to keep shooters out of schools.” They propose “fostering safe and trusting school environments that can prevent violent incidents, creating evidence-based crisis intervention programs in schools to identify and support students who may be in crisis, implementing evidence-based security upgrades to prevent shooters’ access to schools and classrooms, and initiating trauma-informed emergency planning protocols so that staff can secure schools and law enforcement can respond quickly.”  (everytownresearch.org) Theoretically, we have the capacity to do all that. Do we have the spine?

Apparently not. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee just signed into law legislation that allows public school faculty or staff to be armed. This bill does have constraints built in, but it looks to faculty and staff to solve a problem it has failed to address. Tennessee Lookout, a non-profit news organization known for its commentary, writes, “The Tennessee ‘arm the teachers’ legislation superficially allowing public school faculty and staff to carry guns has the potential for tragic disasters and is awash with so many hurdles, caveats, and restrictions that few if any Tennessee school districts are likely to use it. When distilled to its essence, this newborn law is a legislative con job by those who want to appear to have done something to prevent school firearm violence while at the same time doing nothing. Back in Roman times, at least Nero fiddled.” (tennesseelookout.com)

Although the legislation offers guardrails and requirements, only those who approve participants will know who’s armed. Parents won’t know if their school has opted into the program or if their child’s teacher is armed. (washpost.com)

I am vehemently opposed to arming teachers. Armed and trained personnel like the police in Uvalde failed to save lives, and they have far more training in firearms than teachers ever will. Is it realistic to expect a teacher, even one trained in firearms use, to be able to get to a properly locked-up gun and use it to save lives? Might that teacher be seen as the shooter by first responders? What will stop disgruntled students from overpowering teachers and taking the guns? What is the impact on the classroom environment and student/teacher relationships? Couldn’t the resources devoted to implementing these laws be better spent on mental health responses?

There’s a reason that major stakeholder groups object to these laws. The American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, The National Association of School Resource Officers, the President and Executive Director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 75 police forces from large cities in the USA and Canada, all oppose arming teachers. (everytownresearch.org 2)

Even before the pandemic, schools and their staff were asked to take on far more than traditional education, and the demands of student mental health issues have escalated. Placing the responsibility on teachers to solve school shootings is not only unethical; it’s also ineffective and dangerous.

We need legislators to overcome their debts to the gun lobby and do the right thing. Let’s use laws to protect our students in ways that matter. Let’s work on real gun control and keeping guns out of the classroom. Let’s have the courage to enact laws that will make everyone safer. Let’s let teachers teach.