Safe, not sorry
Make NM schools tougher targets
Top state education officials and lawmakers came to an obvious conclusion as they wrestled with the question of how to prevent deadly school shootings — namely that there are no easy fixes to make schools totally safe.
“Whatever we do, there will still be incidents,” said Sen. John Arthur Smith, a Deming Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. True enough. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to make our schools more difficult targets.
As reported in an Associated Press story in last Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal, it turns out some of the nation’s urban schools in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York have had metal detectors and other security measures in place for years — largely as a response to drug and gang violence.
“I think urban schools are eons ahead,” said Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association. “They’ve been dealing with violence a lot longer than suburban schools.”
These kinds of security measures won’t shock our kids. Many of them have had to take off their shoes and be searched to get on an airplane, and they know that major events like NFL games have had procedures in place for years that include metal detectors and handbag searches.
Marchers across the country last month rallied for protection from gun violence, and there are measures that can and should be put into place to make all of us safer. Real background checks for all gun sales, a procedure for taking guns away when people like Parkland High School shooter Nikolas Cruz clearly pose a danger and raising the legal age for purchasing a long gun should be at the top of that list. While there is a debate raging over whether some teachers with proper training should be allowed to carry weapons, there should be no debate about police officers assigned to schools doing so. In Maryland on March 20, a student with a handgun fatally shot a classmate and seriously wounded another. When he was confronted by an armed school resource officer, the gunman fatally shot himself in the head. That armed officer possibly averted another massacre.
There is a popular call for banning the sale of assault style rifles like the one used by Cruz, but that’s more about political sound bites than safety. New Mexico hasn’t been spared from the scourge of school shooting tragedies. One of the shooters here used a handgun at Aztec High School and the other a modified shotgun at a Roswell Middle School. The former was a legally purchased weapon and the latter a weapon that belonged to the boy’s father.
It’s also worth recalling that the worst school-related shooting on the books was at Virginia Tech in 2007 when senior Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 with handguns.
We absolutely can and should move toward sensible changes in gun laws and give law enforcement power to intervene in clear situations. That’s on the hope that they would do a better job than they did at Parkland in Florida, where a bumbling FBI and local sheriff bear some of the responsibility for the massacre of 17 people.
But that should not preclude making smart investments in our schools that make them more difficult targets. Yes, it is a concession to the loss of innocence.
But that innocence has long been washed away in blood. The challenge now is to do something about it.