Tackle gun crisis like health problem
When a public health emergency threatens the well-being of our children, we readily understand the need to respond on multiple levels simultaneously.
In Florida, we’ve enacted laws requiring kindergarten students to have received diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, and varicella vaccines. We charge our school health practitioners with the responsibility for early detection and a forceful, considered response to outbreaks of any of these infections.
And parents, of course, have a vital and important role in teaching their kids best practices in keeping themselves healthy:
Don’t eat something you picked up from the floor. Wash your hands. And so on.
There is nothing unreasonable or objectionable about this multi-pronged approach to ensuring better health outcomes for our children.
But in the gun debate, we tend to lose our mind.
We need to tackle school gun safety the same way we fight measles.
Enact reasonable and responsible laws restricting the wholesale proliferation of tools that have no explicit purpose other than the killing of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
Train school personnel in how to recognize (and intervene with) at-risk students. Educate parents to recognize the signs of potential gun violence before it starts. Teach our kids — as painful as it may be — active shooter response drills. Encourage anonymous reporting of dangerous and threatening behavior.
Our response to gun violence in our schools should not be binary. Neither should the debate.
MICHAEL GAVAGHEN, BOCA RATON