What hasn’t changed since state’s worst day
On Thursday, an email from my older son’s school informed parents that they’d practiced a “lockdown/barricade drill” that morning. It went well, the email said, and class resumed seven minutes later.
It’s understandable why school leaders feel like they have to do this. Even as evidence mounts that such drills are traumatic in and of themselves, and may not serve as effective preparation for an emergency, schools need to be seen as doing something. Because, as everyone knows, the threat someday could be real.
Routine school lockdown drills provide one answer to a question we hear a lot these days: “Is this how we have to live?” In the aftermath of another deadly school shooting, this time in Michigan, with threats of violence closing schools in local towns and the arrival of another Sandy Hook anniversary, we ask ourselves, is this just what life will be like for the foreseeable future?
The answer is, apparently, yes. Nothing fundamentally has changed in the nine years since the worst day in Connecticut history to make us believe otherwise. It doesn’t mean there hasn’t been progress worth noting, or that many people haven’t been working hard to change those fundamental circumstances. But as the last two weeks have demonstrated, there is, and likely always will be, a nonzero chance of something similar happening at any random point in the future.
It’s a threat unique to this country, and one that we’ve shown various degrees of urgency in solving. But there’s little reason to think it’s a threat we can eliminate.
Like any public safety issue, it’s important to maintain perspective. Despite the headlines, schools are an overwhelmingly safe place. Incidents like we saw in Michigan, where a student is charged with killing four classmates and injuring others on Nov. 30, are rare. But because children are uniquely vulnerable, and because of the powerlessness that accompanies threats to their safety, the issue takes on heightened importance. And anyone who remembers Sandy Hook would, presumably, do anything to ensure it never happens again.
The truth is, though, we haven’t taken those steps, and those steps might not be realistic. It comes down to how heavily armed this country already is, and how little it takes for one person to act in a way that affects multitudes of other people. We can’t stop every threat.
Many things have changed since that day nine years ago. Schools are much less welcoming than they were a generation ago, when nearly anyone could walk into a building and go up to the front desk to ask for help. Now it’s more like entering a secure facility, which may be necessary, but is also a little sad. A school should be a welcome, open place, but these days can feel more like a fortress.
And despite the lack of action on the federal level, there has been notable progress in Connecticut and other states on making it harder for guns to get into the wrong hands, part of series of laws passed after Sandy Hook. But those only go so far. There’s nothing to stop anyone from driving across state lines, which makes federal action key. Far from passing, say, legislation to expand background checks, Republican members of Congress are instead competing this year to show whose family is the most heavily armed in their Christmas card photos.
This isn’t a call for defeatism. Many people have been fighting this battle and winning gains locally. But it’s also true that when it comes to mass shootings — at schools or at a workplace, at the mall or on a street corner — the threat would be real even if gun sales were outlawed tomorrow. The nation is awash in firearms, and even if nearly all of them were safely locked away in people’s homes, as Connecticut law requires when children are present, it only takes one to wreak havoc.
We talk a lot about mental health in relation to this threat. For a while we talked about violent video games, as if violent media isn’t available in every country on earth, and as if mental health hasn’t been a challenge throughout human history. We can and should do more to reach out to people before they resort to violence, but there’s little reason to think that can solve mass shootings, or even that mental health is atop our list of concerns on this question.
The issue has always been how easily available guns are in this country. There will always be disgruntled teenagers and bad parents. There haven’t always been easily available means of killing many people in the blink of an eye.
That’s the result of a series of decisions we’ve made as a country. It’s true that not all of us signed up for this deal, but it remains one that we’re stuck with. America, or a sizable portion, anyway, loves its guns too much to change. And so we don’t need to wonder whether there will be a next time; we just wonder when it will inevitably be.