The focus right now is, as usual, on the relative ease of access that most adult Americans have to guns, in the wake of the Florida shooting. I’d like to point to two alternative enabling factors that explain these sudden mass shootings on public school campuses:
First, schools are relatively unprotected. I speak from experience. A couple of middle-aged ladies in an office can’t guard an almost all-glass door against a madman (why do schools have so many top-to-bottom glass doors?) and protect a school filled with hundreds of kids from kindergarten through fifth grade. It’s always boggled my mind that we send the most precious people in our lives to institutions filled with unlocked doors and (mostly) women without the means to defend them if necessary.
Secondly, public schools create an artificially toxic environment that tribalizes children. Force kids into an unnatural social environment, especially junior high and high school, and they begin forming social strata, conformity, and then enforcing that conformity with persistent ridicule and bullying. The ridiculed and the bullied are forced to endure it 8 hours a day, every day of the week. It’s really no wonder that suicide rates skyrocket during the school year, and some of the bullied or ostracized snap and shoot up a school.
The solution to the first would be to create safer schools, with private security patrolling the grounds. The emphasis here is on private security, as opposed to cops. A private security contractor works for a private company, not the government. He wouldn’t be unionized, he would have far better and more comprehensive training than a cop, and there would be far more accountability for any misconduct. There would be none of the silliness about the private contractor being your kid’s ‘friend’ as there is with the police. He would be there to do one thing: protect the school. He wouldn’t be arresting kids, putting them in handcuffs, or milking them for self-incriminating information.
The solution to the second is trickier, because it strikes at the foundation of the entire public school system. Middle- and high-schoolers can be unbelievably cruel to each other, especially if they know their tribe is backing them up. And of course they can bully someone to the point that the individual either kills themselves or kills other students. These bullies are a threat to everyone, if their behavior pushes someone to the point that they consider an attack. Public school is the State’s propaganda pipeline to the minds of the young of this country, so it won’t die any time soon, so the only option we have as parents is to pay attention to our children and look for signs of bullied or bullying behavior, and to get them out of that warped environment with their sanity intact while there’s still time.
