Another Hard Day (and More Unintended Consequences)

Guns in Schools

Content warning: school violence.

This is a hard day for so many people, and it’s hard in a specific way for parents, students, and school staff. While mass shootings in schools may be statistically rare, they happen enough that they are a legitimate concern and source of anxiety for people who have to go into school buildings every day, or who have to send their children into those buildings.

And of course, this is an especially terrible day for the families who lost loved ones in the Appalachee High School shooting in Georgia, for the shooting victims who are still alive, for the community surrounding the school, and for mass shooting survivors everywhere who may find this news incredibly triggering.

Of course, there are steps we can take to reduce the number of weapons in schools, and there are steps we can take to reduce the number of school shootings. I explored some of the research specifically on school shootings a few weeks ago, and from what I gather, the following have strong research support and don’t involve a whole lot of controversy (begging the question of whether there is any reason, aside from an overzealous gun lobby, that we haven’t done more to prevent these incidents):

• Create incentives for securing guns, and penalties for not doing so. It’s unclear where the Appalachee student shooter got his AR-style weapon, but based on past experience, it’s a fairly safe guess is that he stole it from home or from another place where an adult who had legally purchased the gun had stored it incorrectly. (According to the New York Times, “When interviewed by sheriff’s officers last year, the boy’s father said his son did not have ‘unfettered’ access to his hunting rifles”.)

• Address the larger social issues that lead to gun violence, rather than putting the onus on schools to “harden” themselves against intruders and by transforming themselves into prisons. (There isn’t a whole lot of evidence I can find that “hardening” schools is effective at preventing shootings, although some reports have suggested that easily-locked classroom doors and a school panic button system might have helped in this case.)

• Stop incentivizing people to carry guns everywhere without proper training. You can support the Second Amendment while remembering it contains the words “well-regulated militia” in it as a justification for the need to bear arms.

• Implement common-sense security upgrades. As I’ve written before, in my previous job I had to explicitly cite the Uvalde incident, which involved a malfunctioning exterior door, and implicitly threaten to publicly criticize the district, to get the district to use existing funds earmarked for security to finally upgrade the classroom doors in my school. (Based on initial reports, at least some student lives may have been saved by the kind of automatically-locking door I had to beg for in that district for years.)

Many of these measures are broadly possible, but it seems that, as with so many things in America, it will take more than voting, more than opinion polls, and more than waiting around for action from public leaders. It will likely take direct, grassroots action: protests, strikes, and other peaceful means of demanding the attention this issue deserves.

Anyway…

Yesterday, I wrote about Tuesday’s SC State Board of Education meeting, and focused on commentary around book bans and the “unintended consequences” of statewide policies.

But the specific focus of the meeting agenda was on passing a model cell phone ban policy, and the board did that.

One of the unintended consequences voiced by at least one parent came into sharp relief the next day, when a fourteen-year-old student brought an AR-style weapon to his Georgia school, killing two students and four teachers, and injuring at least nine more people.

On Tuesday, a parent rose during public comment to share his concerns about the statewide phone policy. He cited, like other speakers, Board Chair David O’Shields’ concern that whatever policy they passed faced “the law of unintended consequences”.

One consequence of an all-day phone ban, as opposed to specific restrictions during instructional time, said the parent, was that students would not be able to contact their parents during emergencies such as mass shooting events. He specifically cited the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which children in the school with phones alerted police that a gunman (who had been able to exploit an exterior door that was supposed to lock automatically, but did not) was in the building with them.

He also cited the Spring Valley High School incident involving an officer using excessive force against a student during class, which was captured and ultimately brought to light by other students using their phone cameras. One student who filmed the incident was arrested for doing so.

Photo by autumn_ schroe on Unsplash

In the wake of the Georgia shooting, I’ve seen multiple parents on social media voicing this same concern. After the meeting, the South Carolina Department of Education shared a Facebook blurb about the new policy. One of the first-posted comments shared an article about the Georgia shooting, and read,

My child has my full permission to break any established rule that compromises their safety. Yes this is Georgia but this is today! You want them to focus? Make sure our kids aren’t dodging bullets I’m sure that’ll help a lot.

Another read,

Schools aren’t safe. Another shooting today. Worry about banning guns instead of phones and books. I want my kids to be able to contact me if they need to. Not following this rule.

Policies will almost always face “the law of unintended consequences,” and that doesn’t automatically make them bad policies. I have seen a great deal of support for the general concept of reducing cell phones in classes, but I hope that districts use whatever flexibility they have under the new model cell phone ban policy to make smart decisions that balance student safety, mental health, and academics.

And while I hope parents will work with districts in implementing reasonable policies, districts likely need to engage with the very real fear people have about sending their kids to school in America. While phones certainly are linked to greater anxiety, so are school shootings, and research suggests that we need to do more to address both the root causes of those shootings, and the psychic toll experiencing and hearing about school shootings every year is taking on our students and school staff.

More Resources:

Cox, Robert. “SLED: Weapons violations up in SC, most other crimes lower in 2022”. WSPA News. November 2023.

Freilich, et al. “Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data” (TASSS). National Criminal Justice Reference Service. August 2021.

“How Can We Prevent Gun Violence in American Schools?” Everytown. June 2023.

Jackson, Gavin. “Gun Violence/ This Week in South Carolina.” SCETV Radio. April 2023.

Jimenez, Kayla. “Back-to-school reality: Campus shootings rose dramatically last year.” USA Today. August 2024.

K-12 School Shooting Database.

Klein et al. “Characteristics and Obtainment Methods of Firearms Used in Adolescent School Shootings”. Journal of the American Medical Association Network. November 2023.

Musa, Amanda. “Most school shootings aren’t mass killings, study finds, and they’re often driven by community violence”. CNN. November 2023.

“Police Interviewed Georgia Suspect About Shooting Threats in 2023”. New York Times. Accessed September 5, 2024.

SC Reported School Gun- and Weapon- Related Incidents (spreadsheet).

South Carolina Has History of School Shootings. Independent Mail. March 2022.