A RADICAL SUGGESTION FOR DETERRING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

I started this essay off with one point in mind, but as I wrote and researched it, another point made itself evident to me. I have found what I believe to be a previously-undiscovered method of deterring school shootings. I’ll first talk about the methods which have been bandied about in the press recently, and then I’ll disclose the new method of deterring school shootings which I have discovered.

What measures will best deter mass mayhem at schools? If by some form of magic, you could make all the guns in America disappear overnight, those determined to wreak havoc on schools would be deterred, but they would quickly turn to other means—like home made bombs, for instance. As Timothy McVeigh and the Austin bomber demonstrated, bombs are easily made from common ingredients. The worst mass killing at a school in American history was a bombing, not a shooting.

Someone determined to kill can inflict a lot of damage with something as low tech as a knife, as was done in the Franklin Regional school stabbing in 2014 which injured 27. The nightmare low-tech weapon for such a mass attack would probably be a katana, a saber, or even a machete. Killing sprees using swords were at one time common in some cultures, which gave us the term “running amok,” or “running amuck.” The DSM‑5 actually classifies “amok” as a form of dissociative disorder. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Abnormal and Clinical Psychology, 1:161.

Banning certain types of firearms will probably do as little to deter school shootings as Prohibition did to deter drunkenness. Under Prohibition, those who could live without drinking didn’t get drunk; but those who couldn’t live without drinking found a way. Banning the sale of AR-15’s and AK-47’s would do little to nothing about those guns already in circulation. Outlawing those guns in circulation will simply drive them underground, and a determined criminal will get access to such a gun anyhow. Assuming you could successfully ban all modern firearms, one who was intent on mass murder could simply gun up with half a dozen cap-and-ball revolvers as did William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. A half-way competent machinist can build a firearm. I actually prosecuted a murder case where a man killed his wife with a gun he made from cast iron pipe. It shot a finishing nail punch which was ½” in diameter, and he thought it would be untraceable. As things turned out, it was easily traceable to his workshop, where we found all the ingredients.

I have suggested in previous posts that enhanced mental health screening would be the best method of identifying and neutralizing the threat from potential mass-shooters, and Florida’s recently-passed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act makes a valiant effort in that direction. The part of the act of which I was most skeptical was the provision for “arming teachers.” No offense to anyone, but as I recall my high school days, I wouldn’t trust most of my high school teachers with loaded firearms. (Especially the one who used to talk about lining his students up in front of a brick wall and machine gunning them). I was afraid that the act would simply provide for passing out guns to teachers as though they were passing out party favors. Reading the act has calmed my fears. The vetting, training, and retraining process that the act requires before allowing a non-law-enforcement school employee to go armed is rigorous. I think they ought to require all school resource officers to go through the same process as outlined in the act.

As was shown only recently in Maryland, an armed school security officer who is willing to confront a school shooter rather than stand outside the school counting his change while the shooting is in progress is the surest way to stop a school shooting. This was by no means an isolated incident, but when such incidents occur, they get downplayed. When an Arapaho County school shooter became aware that a deputy sheriff was coming to confront him, he committed suicide rather than face the deputy. Snopes.com questioned whether the imminent arrival of the deputy saved lives, saying that it was a “speculative notion” that imminent arrival of an armed officer hand anything to do with the shooter’s suicide. Other incidents where armed personnel successfully engaged school shooters include but are certainly not limited to: the Umpqua Community College shooting in 2015, the FSU library shooting in 2014, The Reynolds High School Shooting in 2014 (interestingly, although some media neglected to report that the shooter had committed suicide after being engaged by police, this fact was included in Gordon A. Crews, Critical Examinations of School Violence and Disturbance in K-12 Education, 216), the Seattle Pacific University shooting in 2014 (the building monitor used pepper spray and a flying tackle to subdue the shooter while he was reloading), and the Santa Monica College shooting in 2013 where John Zawahri started a killing spree with his parents and then went to a college campus to shoot at passing cars. He was killed by responding officers.

It cannot be denied that armed security personnel in schools can stop school shootings. How about deterring the shootings? They're not going to deter a school shooting if their presence and effectiveness are little-known facts. If they were well-known facts, I think that would serve as a deterrent.

A common theme I found in researching the shootings listed above was the reticence of the articles I read to say anything about the shooter being neutralized by the police. Perhaps one thing that can be done in order to deter future school shootings would be for the media to give wall-to-wall coverage of school shooters getting shot by security personnel similar to the wall-to-wall coverage they give to mass shootings. Would-be shooters who see massive coverage of the grief following a shooting are encouraged to go out and cause more grief. Would-be shooters who saw enough footage of school-shooters being stopped by armed officers might decide to go somewhere other than a school to do their mass shootings.

My previously undiscovered method of deterring school shootings, therefore, is this: Find some way to persuade the media to give massive publicity to the officers who neutralize school shooters, thereby demonstrating to potential school shooters that there is little to be gained beyond a shortened life-expectancy by running amok in a school.

MEDIA COVERAGE OF FISTFIGHTS AT FOOTBALL PRACTICE

I understand completely why the news media would want to report on the Treon Harris case; he is accused of an awful crime. But the attention given the Skyler Mornhinweg/Gerald Willis fistfight is a bit much. I don’t blame the police for responding to the call for assistance, but I’ve got to wonder what the person who called them was thinking. The media is another matter. Don’t they have anything better to do? Football, in case nobody noticed, is a game of violent physical contact played by young men inured to such violence. Players fired up by physical contact at football practice can become involved in on-field fistfights. So long as that’s all there is to it, an at-practice fistfight is a matter of team discipline, not a police matter, and certainly not anything the media should be concerned about. The players, after all, are wearing armor designed to protect them from violent blows. The main thing that a player needs to remember in such a situation is to keep his helmet on. 

I remember a long ago fight on the practice field at UF which was handled, I think, appropriately. We’ll call the combatants Moe and Larry. It happened like this: Moe, a redshirt offensive player, was woolgathering on the sideline while the defense scrimmaged against the freshman team offense. (I said it was a long time ago). Having nothing better to do, Moe decided to walk over to the field where the offense was scrimmaging the freshman defense. (The two fields were side by side with a distance of about five yards between them). Moe engaged Larry, a redshirt defensive player, in a conversation which soon became heated. The next thing you know, they were squared off like boxers throwing punches at each other. Since neither one of them really knew how to box, and neither one of them was going to back up, most of the punches landed. I saw no body shots, only head shots. Moe wasn’t wearing a helmet, but Larry was. The fight was short-lived, with the coaches quickly intervening and separating the combatants. When I say the coaches intervened, I don’t mean that they physically got between the two—they didn’t have to. Snarling “break it up” at the combatants was enough to separate them. Then came the tongue lashing.

Aside from bruised knuckles, Larry was none the worse for wear. Moe hadn’t fared so well. His face was a bloody mess, and his knuckles were cut and bleeding from contact with Larry’s nose guard and chinstrap buckle. They sent Moe to the infirmary for medical attention and practice continued. The police weren’t called and the media weren’t notified. Aside from the tongue lashing they got on the practice field, I don’t know if Moe and Larry received any other discipline. I think the worst repercussion Moe suffered was the ribbing he got from his teammates for getting into a fight with his helmet off.

TALK SHOWS

Yesterday I got a call from a radio talk show in the Far West asking if I would agree to appear on a two hour segment this morning to discuss the coverage of the Zimmerman case. I was somewhat reluctant, as I am no fan of talk shows, but I agreed. At the appointed time, I received a call from the station and listened patiently to a series of commercials as I waited to go on air.

I was first asked what I thought it was about the case that made such a media splash. I said I thought it was the youth of the deceased, coupled with the even more youthful photograph that was initially shown in the media. The moderator said he disagreed with me, that it was race, pure and simple. He went on to make some remarks about how the media had manipulated public opinion by using such a youthful picture of Martin. I suggested that it might not be manipulation, but that the picture used was the only one the family had. I’ve had at least two cases where there was only one photograph of the victim available. The moderator said he wasn’t buying that at all, and it seemed to me that he was suggesting that I was being disingenuous. I responded that I had a policy of not attributing malice when some other explanation was available. I pointed out that this philosophy undergirds our criminal justice system.

He wanted to know what I thought about the verdict, and I said it looked to me as though the jury wanted to convict Zimmerman of something, but did not think that what he did constituted manslaughter or murder. I said I agreed with the jury’s verdict.

The moderator steered us back to the issue of race, and then he held forth at length saying that the coverage was about race, pure and simple, and that the age of the victim had nothing to do with it. I suggested that we perform a thought experiment. Imagine that Zimmerman had shot a 45 year old 6’6” black male convicted felon. Would there have been extensive coverage if that had been the case? He intimated that I was presenting irrelevant hypotheticals and, if I heard him correctly, opined that there would probably have been the same amount of coverage. We then cut to commercials. I got the impression that the longer I talked, the less the moderator liked me.

The underlying thesis of the show seemed to be that the left-leaning media had sensationalized the coverage and ignored the facts to advance their liberal agenda. During the commercial, I began to gather my thoughts to diplomatically express this thought. It appeared to me that he, as a right-leaning member of the media, just might be sensationalizing his coverage to advance a conservative agenda. Of course, I was willing to stipulate that he had not consciously done that because of my policy of seeking innocent motives for people’s actions. It is probably a good thing that I didn’t get a chance to voice this opinion. The first commercial had not finished before a representative came on the line, thanked me for my time, and said they wouldn’t need me anymore.

The Zimmerman case has become a political football, with rabid partisans on both sides of the political spectrum talking loudly about it. The debate is producing more heat than light. I reiterate the call I made in a previous post that everyone back off, take a deep breath, and calm down. The only thing that the Zimmerman verdict means is that the state failed to carry its burden of proof.