(Katelyn Strathy/CU Independent Graphic)
Opinions do not necessarily represent CUIndependent.com or any of its sponsors.
What kind of society lets school shootings happen?
Columbine was the anomaly. That’s what we said, isn’t it? Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just fell through the cracks?
Sure, there were signs — a troubling school paper, concerning home videos, diaries full of death threats — but nobody knew enough to do enough. They were the anomaly — unpredictable and unfathomable.
Then it happened again, one month later. And again. And again. Over two-hundred school shootings since Columbine. Over two-hundred people who “fell through the cracks.”
There’s a word for an anomaly that happens again and again until it’s not so anomalous anymore. That word is regularity. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were the anomaly; Nickolas Cruz is the regularity.
The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School spurred students, parents and politicians to demand change.
Overwhelming support emerged for increasing gun control and funding for mental health screenings. Congress seemed poised to take sweeping actions and President Trump said he’d give law enforcement the power to confiscate weapons from the mentally ill (before due process, no less).
Then the dichotomous rhetoric set in. Background checks or due process? Assault rifles or mental health? The NRA or the FBI? Gun control or guns in schools?
Arguments were reduced to their political affiliation, policies shortened to soundbites and politicians slandered outright. The debate became passionate and compassionless, pitting good people against equally good people.
All because dichotomy overwhelmed nuance. Our argument proceeded from a rational policy debate to an unrelenting moral war between Right and Left, whose prize and playing field are one in the same.
A survivor compared Senator Marco Rubio to a school shooter. The Governor of Connecticut called the NRA a “terrorist organization.” NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch claimed the liberal media “loves” mass shootings.
But the differences between Right and Left aren’t as insurmountable as our rhetoric makes them seem. That’s just the dichotomy talking.
Guns in schools seems like an absurd policy for anyone who comes from an urban or suburban school district. It may even be a decidedly bad policy for those school districts. Still, more than nine million children attend schools in rural areas, many of whom live in counties where emergency response time is four or five times slower than it would be for their urban counterparts.
Is the proposal to arm an administrator or teacher from these districts so absurd? What happens to students when a school shooter can’t be stopped for half an hour? We should protect all children, not just those living near urban metropolises.
And, for many, gun control seems equally absurd. There are more than 300 million firearms in this country, won’t prospective shooters find a way? After all, the 1994 assault weapons ban was in effect when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold acquired the weapons they’d later use to massacre their classmates.
But in his diary where he planned his assault on Columbine High School, Eric Harris fumed about how the Brady Bill complicated his efforts to purchase additional firearms.
Gun control alone won’t solve the problem, but simple steps — fixing background checks, applying age restrictions and limiting magazine capacity — might go a long way. And isn’t it worth it? To give up thirty-round magazines for fifteen-rounds and know that in the process you just might be saving fifteen lives?
A child’s right to life will always be more valuable than your right to purchase a firearm without a background check.
The premise of this column was that no person — and no ideology — can have all the answers. When it comes to school shootings, neither do. School shootings are a more pervasive problem than either the Left or the Right alone can fix.
There is a great quote in the movie “Spotlight.” When he’s asked how the Catholic Church could hide so many pedophile priests for so long, defense attorney Mitchell Garabedian says, “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”
We like problems to have simple causes because then they’d have simple solutions. But in any society, the problems are bigger than we think, and the solutions are more complicated than we’d care to imagine.
It’s never just the priests and it’s never just the guns. Sure, it’s both of those things, but it’s also the police, the lawyers, the politicians, the media, the culture and, mostly, it’s the whole damn village.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Henry Bowditch at henry.bowditch@colorado.edu.
