School shootings should not be new normal

Not even five weeks since the deadly shooting at a high school in Florida, students at a high school in Maryland feared for their lives Tuesday when a classmate toting a gun started shooting. The reality is difficult to comprehend. A generation ago, that scenario could have been a plot for a bad movie, not a terror of school life today.

The motives of the two high school shooters may differ, but when someone decides a gun is the proper answer to a problem, something in society is seriously out of whack.

The carnage at Great Mills High School Tuesday was limited because a school resource officer ran to the sound of gunfire and immediately engaged the 17-year-old shooter, who had critically injured a 16year-old girl. Authorities weren’t sure the next day whose volley of shots struck a nearby 14-year-old boy and inflicted non-life-threatening injuries.

School security has taken on new urgency since the massacre at Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14. Local school boards are debating the most effective way to protect students — school resource officers, metal detectors, hardened infrastructure — without turning what should be places of learning into armed fortresses. One security proposal favored by President Trump, however, — weaponizing teachers — is clearly perilous and must be scuttled.

In Washington at a hearing on the same day as the latest school shooting, Connecticut’s education commissioner warned that arming teachers would be dangerous. “When law enforcement officers descend on the chaos of a school shooting scene and there are multiple people holding guns, they will not have the opportunity to distinguish the good guy with a gun from the murderer,” Commissioner Dianna Wentzell told the forum on school climate, school safety and violence prevention. The forum was conducted by the Democratic members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

There is not a single solution to stemming gun violence in our schools or elsewhere; action must be taken on several fronts. One promising step — finally — is the House of Representatives’ approval last week of the STOP School Violence Act, which provides $50 million to enable schools to identify troubled students and try to help them. The Senate, still dithering over a measure as simple as strengthening background checks, should summon bipartisanship and get behind the STOP School Violence Act.

It is morally imperative that people on all sides of the debates try to figure out how to protect students. But Gov. Dannel Malloy fanned division last week when he said the NRA “acts like a terrorist organization.” He explained he meant that the group uses fear to further its goals, but the words he chose are counterproductive.

Students themselves are getting involved to push leaders to action. They had a national school walkout March 14 — students at Great Mills participated — and will join for a national March For Our Lives this Saturday. They are rightly demanding action; the nation must respond.

Students themselves are getting involved to push leaders to action.