School Shootings and Gun Control

Main Title

Improving School Safety Measures to Address the Problem of School Shootings

Abstract

School shootings are a problem that, unfortunately, is not going away.  Every year there seems to be another one, and by now the list is far too long for any civilized society to continue to view itself as civilized.  What is at the heart of the problem of school shootings?  Is it guns?  Is it a lack of school security?  Or is it something else?  This paper will examine some of the most deadly school shootings before discussing the Uvalde elementary school shooting of 2022.  Then it will examine the possible gun control measures and school safety measures that could resolve the problem.  It will conclude with a suggestion that American society take a closer look at the mental health of school shooters.

Introduction

The recent shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 children and two teachers dead.  It ranks as the third deadliest school shooting in American history.  Why did it happen?  Was it because 18 year old Salvador Ramos had too easy access to guns?  Or does the problem run deeper and exist on multiple levels?  Should schools be more secure since school shootings have now become more commonplace?  Should teachers be armed?  Or should guns be banned completely in the US in spite of the 2^nd Amendment of the US Constitution? 

Thesis Statement

When it comes to school shootings, there are no easy answers—but based on what we do know about them it stands to reason that precautions on the level of gun control and school safety can be implemented to better protect students.

Body of Paper

Most Deadly School Shootings

            The deadliest school shooting in America happened in 2007 at Virginia Tech.  23 year old Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean immigrant to the US, suffered from mental instability which eventually erupted in violence on his college campus, when he began shooting students in the various halls of the campus.  Cho had suicidal and homicidal thoughts throughout his life (Lyttle, 2012; Schulte & Jenkins, 2007).  He failed, however, to receive the medical help he needed in spite of a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, severe anxiety, and mental illness.  Cho was on antidepressants at the time—also known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) (Huffington, 2007).

            The second deadliest school shooting in America happened in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  The shooter was 20 year old Adam Lanza, and he killed 27 people—the majority of them first-graders.  Lanza suffered mental issues stemming from family problems at home (his parents were divorced and his mother was overly-protective in some ways).  Because of his mental health issues, he too was prescribed SSRIs (Barker, 2014). 

            The third deadliest school shooting was the Uvalde shooting in Texas that happened in 2022.  It is followed by the University of Texas Tower Shooting of 1966, the Parkland school shooting of 2018, and the Columbine shooting of 1999.  In all of these shootings, mental illness was a major factor.  Ramos, for instance, is reported to have been a cutter—one who self-harms by cutting himself with a razor blade (Pettaway, 2022).  Ramos clearly did not have a stable home life, and whatever mental health or spiritual issues he was dealing with went on without being addressed by a professional.  Like many school shooters, he had a fascination with morbidity and would joke about raping and kidnapping girls, abuse animals for fun, and fantasize about killing.

            In the Uvalde shooting, Ramos first shot his grandmother and then proceeded to Robb Elementary.  He posted frequently to social media, and hinted at what he was going to do that day, the 24^th of May, 2022.  However, the big issue that politicians have focused on during this tragedy is the fact that Ramos bought guns when he turned 18—the legal age to purchase guns in the US.  State Senator Roland Gutierrez, for example, seemed to chide gun-rights advocates by saying that the “first thing” Ramos did on his 18^th birthday was go out and acquire two “military style assault weapons” (Shennan, 2022).  Lost in the blaming and finger pointing is any concern for the mental health issues Ramos obviously had.  Instead, in the wake of the Uvalde shooting—like in the wake of every school shooting—the topic most often discussed in partisan politics is the issue of gun control.   

Robb Elementary School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas

            Would gun control have prevented Ramos from attacking an elementary school?  It is a question that is impossible to answer.  There are many ways to obtain weapons illegally in this day and age, where military industrial companies receive billions in federal funding to manufacture weapons that are transferred to other parts of the world (in the name of democracy) but that inevitably end up being trafficked in the illegal arms trade.  In short, it does not matter at this point whether guns were banned or not—there are so many weapons floating around in the black market that anyone who had a genuine desire to obtain a weapon would find the means to do so.  Or—if one wanted to injure or kill others without using a gun—there would be other ways, as so many terrorists and homicidal maniacs in Europe have shown in the past:  for instance, the UK has banned guns, but that hasn’t stopped people from attacking others with knives, cars, or other means.  The Uvalde shooter did know he could get weapons—and he used those weapons to carry out a senseless attack on innocent children and people.  But is the gun to blame?  Are there other factors here that need to be addressed?  Certainly there are.  If guns were taken out of the equation, we might be reading about the Uvalde motorist named Ramos who drove into a crowd of shoppers to carry out his angry revenge on society.  Obviously, there was something deeply wrong with Ramos and it showed often:  his peers reported that he tried to pick fights in the park, abused cats and took pictures of dead cats and posted them on social media; that he thought “everyone in this world deserves to get raped” and entertained other morbid fantasies of the sort (Shennan, 2022). These are not the musings of a healthy adolescent mind.  They are the rantings of a deeply disturbed mind.  As Dostoevsky showed in his classic novel Demons, the means of destruction are ancillary—the root of the problem is in the mind.  Ramos had a problem in his mind, and no one around him seemed to be aware of just how deadly that problem had become in spite of all the red flags and warning signs.

Gun Control Measures that Could Resolve the Problem

            Some gun control measures that could prevent the kind of assaults that occur on innocent school children include the banning of assault rifles.  It could be argued that assault rifles are military style weapons that should not be in the hands of young people—especially young people with a history of violence or mental health issues.  One way to prevent young people with mental health issues from acquiring assault weapons or guns in general could be to have them provide a list of referrals of people who can vouch for the good character of the young person.  What would have happened, for example, if the gun vendor who sold Ramos his weapons had been required by law to obtain referrals from the young man before selling the weapons?  This would obviously lengthen the process of purchasing weapons—but it would also create a potential buffer between the lunatic and the acquisition of a gun.  Could Ramos even produce a list of referrals without red flags going off all over the place?  Would the vendor not think twice about selling the guns to Ramos if he knew he would be held accountable if the young man turned out to be homicidal? 

            Then, again, how thorough can background checks like this really be?  Suppose a shooter had plenty of referrals and only later went insane.  Would the gun vendor still be held accountable?  There are many problems that arise when one begins attempting to change laws or put in place stricter laws, which infringe on people’s freedom.  In the US, freedom has always been the number one principle and priority:  it is the backbone of the nation and the reason the nation became an independent country in the first place.  But today many people would sacrifice freedom for security, as they did after 9/11.  Yet that sacrifice does not really end up making anyone safer:  it simply ushers in the era of a police state, of a nanny state, of a state in which personal accountability and responsibility are set aside under the expectation that a benevolent government will look after everyone and everything.  However, anyone who has spent any time in reality will be able to tell you that things simply do not work that way.

            But what if America simply outlawed guns?  Would that solve the problem?  Again, no, it would not.  Criminals would still be able to obtain weapons on the street through the black market simply because so many weapons have been manufactured over the decades that the world is awash with them.  Thirty years ago it was not so common for a police officer to take a gun off the street; today, it happens every day.  Guns are everywhere—and that is an effect both of our society’s fetish for death and violence and an outcome of our government’s submission to the gun lobbies and military industrial complex.  Banning guns would not make a bit of difference at this point.  Nor would it be constitutional—and that matters, too:  the 2^nd Amendment was not written in order to protect lunatics’ right to bear arms, but rather to ensure that citizens and militias could bear arms against tyrants.  That, again, is part of the backbone of America.  If the 2^nd Amendment were abolished, America would stop being a free country that very same day.  It is only the threat of force that prevents tyranny from taking control, and America’s forefathers understood that, which is why it was written into the Constitution.  Notice how in Europe every country has lost its sovereignty and is essentially a vassal of the unelected leaders of the European Union.  When a nation gives up its right to self-defense and to bear arms, it is inviting someone to come in a take its sovereignty.

            But do Americans really need assault rifles?  Couldn’t the government draw the line there?  Perhaps it could.  Assault rifles do seem egregious to many people, and they seem to give lunatics a sense of power that they might otherwise not have.  So maybe if politicians want to act they might draft legislation putting restrictions on who can obtain assault rifles or at least make it harder for just anyone to walk into a store and get one.

School Safety Measures

            Schools need to do a better job as well.  Ramos should have been identified as a troubled youth by school counselors, teachers, principals, and peers—and all the reports that have come in show clearly that his peers knew he had a very troubled mind.  But why wasn’t he put into counseling or therapy?  Perhaps the reason, sadly, is that there are so many youths in America’s schools today who have the same troubled characteristics.  Perhaps the problem is that Ramos represents a type of troubled youth that is now all too common in schools.  Another thing to point out is that even if Ramos did receive counseling, it is very likely he would have been medicated with the same problematic SSRIs typically found in the bloodstreams of other school shooters.  These drugs represent just as much of a risk to one’s mind as the demons of today’s society.  In short, schools can only do so much to help prevent this kind of tragedy from occurring again.  What they can do, to some extent, is turn themselves into maximum security facilities—like prisons—but is this really what America wants to become?  A nation where its schools look more like prisons than school houses?

            Schools could, for instance, have one entrance, armed guards (such as veterans looking for work that know how to handle firearms), armed teachers,  a locking mechanism for teachers to secure classroom doors, undercover officers that look like teachers patrolling the halls, and ways to lockdown halls so that a shooter won’t be able to roam wherever he likes.  Having one entrance into a school would make it easier to deny a shooter access to the interior of the building.  Anyone who enters a school would have to pass through metal detectors under the eye of an armed guard—and in such a setting there is no way someone like Ramos gains access to the school without getting past the guard first.  And if he did get past the guard, he would then face the prospect of a school building’s alarms going off and doors and halls automatically locking.  Police would be alerted immediately and in this type of situation it is highly unlikely that Ramos would be able to kill anyone at all.

            Additionally, having armed guards, such as veterans who have combat training, installed in the schools would make it harder for someone like Ramos to be able to get away with murder.  Someone like Ramos preys on innocent, vulnerable, helpless creatures—like animals and children.  But if there are stronger people around who have the ability to exert deadly force, someone like Ramos would not come within a mile of that place.  Ramos never tried to mess with big animals like bulls or bears or wolves.  He preyed on cats.  And when he decided to kill, who did he aim for?  A helpless old grandmother and helpless children:  anyone can see that if the school had at least some type of armed presence—even if it was just teachers—the shooter probably would not have seen it as such an easy target.