School guns won’t help
Jordan Ruud, Staff Writer
photo: Graphic by Raquel Phillips
Over the last decade or so, with each new school shooting (and how regrettable it is to write that phrase), we’ve heard a new onslaught of arguments from all sides of the political spectrum.
The pro-gun side frequently favors either equipping school authorities with guns, or relaxing conceal-carry laws, permitting students the chance for “self-defense.”
Call me a leftist wimp, but I’m a little nervous of knowing other kids in class might be packing heat. The idea also leads to odd conflicts in terms of classroom authority: mightn’t professor/student confrontations over grades or cheating be that much more charged in the knowledge that a gun might be around?
On the other hand, anyone who really wants a gun can probably get one. This is where the logic of fervent gun control falls somewhat amiss.
Even granting the easy availability of guns to anyone who wants them, though, it seems reasonable to question what a young man might want with the four guns he bought online in preparation for the shooting at Northern Illinois University(NIU).
It may be unreasonable and impossible to ban guns entirely, but it also seems weirdly irresponsible to permit citizens to stockpile personal arsenals at a moment’s notice.
So in an environment where civil libertarians speak righteous aperçus about the Second Amendment and the freedoms we’re guaranteed, and where those very freedoms permit shootings like this to continue, what to do?
None of the solutions that commentators have suggested really get to the heart of the problem — and really, it’s been this way since Columbine and before.
It’s not exclusively a matter of conditioning by media violence and exposure (which arguably do have their place in the onslaught of school shootings): it’s a matter of mental illness, which isn’t always foreseeable or actionable in any meaningful way.
And there’s a monumental callousness to saying that these things just happen. But is there any measure that might be permissible both to advocates of freedom and to citizens who don’t want to live in fear?
The most immediate, intuitive solution is simply to train students via drills and contingency plans. Yet, frighteningly, even expert foresight fell flat during the NIU shooting.
And the damage done by a generation of school shootings continues. The most extreme, utopian solution — that we ban guns entirely — is absurd, bringing thoughts of horses and barn doors. Our culture has advanced, or regressed, to a point of such saturation by guns that such an action would be purposeless.
Events like school shootings are like any form of terrorism: horrors visited on the unsuspecting. They never cleave to a pattern, except that of the unforeseeable.
In the face of such grim possibilities, the best we can do is continue with vigilance and compassion. There may not be pervasive patterns of behavior, but wherever we glimpse a security gap, or the opportunity to redeem another from dangerous pain and isolation, we ought to seize on it.
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