What Can We Do To Prevent Another School Shooting?
Make A National Commitment to Children’s Human Rights
This Memorial Day weekend we mourned the deaths of children who have been killed in school shootings. The shooting of 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 was the canary in the coal mine, a warning of things to come if we weren’t paying attention. We weren’t. In 2012 twenty first graders and six adults were shot to death at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. One would think the murder of innocent six-year-olds would be enough to motivate a national gun control movement — but it wasn’t. Valentine’s Day 2018 found 17 students killed by a shooter at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Fast forward to 2022 when 19 elementary students around 10 years of age and two teachers were blown apart at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
“What can we do?” is a question being asked by caring people of all ages who want violence against children to end. This, to me, is the wrong question. We KNOW what to do. Why as a nation are we unwilling to do what it takes?
What we need to do is make children a national priority. We need a national commitment to protect and defend children’s human rights. These guidelines are found in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — which every single one of the UN member countries have ratified except for the USA. When we look at how almost every developed nation in the world scores better in defending children’s wellbeing and their rights to provisions, protections, and participations, it is important to recognize that they have committed to ensuring the best interests of the child are met in every decision that the government and organizations make. We, sadly, have not.
While some leaders lament how “it could have been worse”, thinking of more lives that could have been lost, make no mistake — 100% of the children in the school were traumatized and will have to find ways to cope with that trauma for the rest of their lives. One hundred percent of their families, friends, and communities have unimaginable grief that may never be healed. But imagine what it was like to be those children who were scared and counting on adults to do the right thing in their best interests to keep them safe — and didn’t. We don’t want to imagine their horror because it’s too hard.
Instead, we find a national blame-game occurring as everyone seems to be skipping around the real issue.One theme is on guns themselves — we blame the gun manufacturers, the gun sellers, the state regulators, gun trainers, ammunition supplies, the black-market gun-runners, gun owners, the NRA and the mega-MAGA gun-pushers. We blame Congress and the people we elect or appoint at the national, state, and local levels for not instituting gun control measures that work. We blame police who are trigger-happy, fumbling Barney Fife’s, or who stand around not knowing how to diffuse a crisis situation without doing something horrifically dumb. To be sure, all of these are culprits in the systematic endangerment of children.
Another one of the nation’s favorite whipping boys when it comes to the blame game is mental illness — people who do violent things must be crazy. But this argument is insane itself because the it’s just not true. The government knows this, as stated in MentalHealth.gov’s website on Mental Health Myths and Facts:
“The vast majority of people with mental health problems are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Most people with mental illness are not violent and only 3%–5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.”
The US Centers for Disease Control report that over 50% of people in the US will be diagnosed with a mental disorder at some point in their lifetime — and this is only the numbers of those who are officially diagnosed. In other words, almost everyone could be considered to have a mental illness at some point if people were adequately diagnosed. Mental illnesses are among the most common health conditions not just in the US but around the world — but we have the most guns per capita, with over 120 guns per 100 people. No surprise, gun violence in the US far exceeds levels found in other countries.
Despite the fact that most people who are violent are not mentally ill, this isn’t stopping the wrong-headed rhetoric that if we just had more police, we would have less violence. The criminal justice community knows that most violent people are not mentally ill. The Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority’s website states
“Despite research showing the vast majority of individuals with mental illness are not violent, the dangerousness of mental illness is frequently exaggerated in the news and entertainment industries. Resultant stigma toward those with mental illness can greatly impact public policy and opinion.”
Thus the go-to linking of violence and mental illness is doomed to be a failed policy strategy. It’s easier to blame mental illness than to confront a national trend of adults who are role-modeling the acceptability of meanness as a new national norm. The words coming out of the mouths of Congressional leaders, parents, and now children reflect this shift in how we deal with people who are, or do, things they don’t like. Hate-filled rhetoric fuels violent actions, and young people are following the leads of their elders.
Another national solution being promoted by leaders is to put more police in schools. This clearly hasn’t worked to date and there are lots of reasons to believe that this is a dangerous, expensive, and counter-productive action that we ought not use as our primary strategy. The American Civil Liberties Union finds schools are pressured to have more police officers on campus, more metal detectors, and turn schools essentially into police states rather than supportive institutions that nurture critical thinking and educational enlightenment. They observe that school districts have shown an obsession with “hardening” schools despite federal data revealing that the real crisis of schools isn’t violence, but a broad failure to hire enough support staff to serve students’ mental health needs.
I did a national analysis of the prevalence of school counselors and police officers and found that more money and support is going into police than counselors, despite the skyrocketing mental health and suicide rates of elementary, secondary, and higher education students. How many counselors are available? On average, 250 counselors per student, which means that only the most crisis-identified students will ever be intercepted or assisted. Noteworthy, almost 2 million students attend schools where there are police officers but no counselors.
Another argument is that we need to arm teachers who could be armed to defend their students. As a teacher, gun-wielding has never been part of my job responsibility or training. When President Trump was in office, several of us teachers went to the Sig Sauer gun store and training facility in New Hampshire to see what was actually involved if we were to become pistol-packing professors. What I learned was that like learning any other skill, being competent to use a gun effectively and efficiently requires a lot of time, training, money, equipment, and expertise. With teachers having to buy their own staplers and school supplies in most schools these days, I’m pretty sure schools won’t give teachers an expense account to purchase guns for each teacher so we are armed and ready… for what?
To be a safe gun-slinger would require that in a 24-hour day, I would have to choose between preparing my classes and creating meaningful assignments, grading, tutoring and communicating with students, developing new curriculum and pedagogical skills, caring for my own family and having a life — or spending many hours at a designated shooting range with a trainer. This would have to be done on my own time and at my own costs. I would have to be expert enough that I would be able to reach into my pant-leg or under my sweater to pull out my pistol, release the lock, point it, and shoot it before somebody with a semi-automatic gun spewed bullets all over me or my children, while I was yelling at them to duck and cover. This is a nonsensical solution for keeping children safe.
The bottom line is that we have not made children a national priority and we need to do this now if we want to avoid future tragedies. It’s time to change the national narrative about what it means to honor children as human beings and rights holders. Steps include:
1. Read and consider what is in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Focus on its articles pertaining to protection from all forms of violence, provision (food, housing, healthcare, education, etc.), and to have a right to participate in decisions that impact their lives.
2. Evaluate your state, city, and organization’s policies and practices to see how well they protect and defend children’s rights.
3. Identify where the gaps are and where children’s rights could be better addressed. This includes providing more available, accessible mental health resources to young people.
4. Work with community groups to see how to institute better child rights protections.
5. See what other countries are doing at the organizational, local, state, and national level to embed children’s human rights and learn from them. Scotland has been the first country to incorporate child rights into domestic law. Learn from them.
6. Invest in children and fund programs that are designed to be in the best interest of the child — not the best interests of manufacturers, businesses, or adult-focused groups.
7. Embed human rights education at different levels of schooling, organizations, businesses, and governments.
8. Create a designation as a child friendly communities or rights respecting school.
9. Establish local and state level regions as children’s human rights respecting cities/states. An example of this is at Salem, Massachusetts., where Mayor Kim Driscoll and Senator Joan Lovely have made a commitment to defend child rights.
10. Develop a national bureau and agency to support children’s human rights at a national level.
On this Memorial Day weekend, reflect upon what we’ve learned since the shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde. Young people have told us what they need! So have grieving parents and schools. In an article I wrote for Public Seminar in 2018, I created a film of the faces, words, and pleas of people of all ages who begged for gun control. The voices of children past and present beg to be heard. Listen to them. We know what do in order to keep children safer. Government leaders haven’t acted in the best interests of the children. The United States needs to make a national commit to making all children of all ages, races, genders, ethnicity, religion, and abilities a priority.
A children’s human rights framework like that in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a road map of how to do this. It isn’t too hard to follow if we truly care for children. The question is — do we really care not just about children, but FOR children? And if so, how much are we willing to sacrifice for them? We will see….
