School shootings: taking aim at a national problem

The latest was in Nashville. A private Christian school. Thoughts and prayers … over and over.

Are we praying for, thinking about, the wrong things. What has gone wrong?

Something should be done! Yes, something should have been done … right after Columbine, after the horrible carnage of little ones at Sandy Hook … but no! The policy makers voices, “Let’s wait until this settles out. Use more reasoning. It’s too emotional now.”

And it continues, for me and for so many others, an unsettling disbelief that we could allow this to continue, an integral part of the gun violence culture that has become a descriptor of the United States. We are offering our children on an altar of intransigence where solutions run the spectrum from eliminating all guns to arming everyone. Where slogans have become the research that fuels the inertia.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Absolutely true. How many school children and their teachers would have died if there were no guns, particularly automatic weapons available to the people who kill people?

Beef up the security of the schools. Spend, spend on making the school house a fortress to respond to the lack of response to the role of gun violence in our nation. Allow the perverted actions of the few change the culture of education.

Arm the teachers! As a retired teacher, you can bet that I have something to say about that. The solution to gun violence is not more guns. Teachers are not gunslingers. Teachers don’t fill the voids left by the inability to sort this problem out. Does this sound like something out of a dime novel?

Take away the all guns. Lots of luck. Guns are important parts of the mythical culture of the frontier, self-sufficiency and specific interpretations of the second amendment. Honest people hunt, though needing an automatic weapon to hunt is beyond my ken. We have numerous examples of countries that have figured out a way to separate guns from violence. Can’t we use these models as templates here?

A firearm is a manufactured object. It did not come from the burning bush nor is it described in the 11th commandment. There is the design, manufacture, sale, ownership and use of guns to look at as we search for solutions. Can design and manufacture be addressed as part of a solution? How do you deal with the illegal manufacture of guns, ghost guns and modifications that make single-shot weapons into automatic weapons.

Who can buy and own a gun? Yes, many states have eliminated sales and ownership of firearms to people who pose a threat to themselves and others, but, even then, triaging the potential buyer has always been difficult without longer wait times and the ability to access pertinent, accurate information. How did the shooters obtain their weapons? Was there a paper trail of information that would have set off an alert to a gun salesperson? The rules of each state are different so that you can own a gun in one state but not another. So many guns are sold illegally that laws don’t apply. Fix the mental health system. Words used to identify what we all suspect, that the shooters are what my grandmother would have described as “not right.” Mental health care for everyone, but especially for young people, is woefully in short supply. No one is significantly making any changes to that.

It is beyond complicated, but not beyond solution.

Still, there is something else that might be relevant as the meaning of school shootings.

When one happens, the news media rapidly produce pictures of the dead and wounded, heart-wrenching stories about each, often spoken by grief-stricken family and friends. There will be photos and video of ad hoc memorials built of teddy bears and flowers and art work and candles and balloons.

There will be film of the police who answered the 911 call, even chilling snippets of children cowering in their classrooms, calling for help. Local politicians and the police chief will hold forth on the preparation and implementation of shooter plans

School children and teachers who survived will be interviewed.

The shooter will be identified, his or her picture displayed on TV and social media. A biography of the shooter will be shared. Relatives, friends and neighbors will make comments about the shooter. Footage from the body cameras will show us the exchange of gunfire and, in most instances, the death of the shooter.

And all of these will live together as an episode in American life. A boxed set of failure. A production, another roadmap for the disgruntled, the disaffected,

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