Schools have suffered some of the nation’s most shocking mass murders in the last decades, so the Las Vegas shooting naturally stirs concerns about the safety of students.
In 1966, the scene at the University of Texas stunned the nation, as television captured a sniper in a bell tower firing round after round. It went on for more than an hour, ending with the deaths of more than a dozen and the wounding of at least twice that number.
A half century later, some names — Columbine in Colorado, VirginiaTech, Sandy Hook in Connecticut and Umpqua in Oregon— have taken new meaning that in a better world would seem absurd. The schools and colleges, places of self-improvement and collective enlightenment, have come to connote dread, sadness and maybe even cynicism about the human condition, and the political one.
All these incidents are senseless, but the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown stands out, if for no reason than the helplessness of the child victims, many as young as 6. It also stands out as the shooting that confirmed the political stalemate over guns in America.
A tearful President Barack Obama addressed the nation, calling on Congress to impose stronger gun controls. And then — nothing happened.
“Everybody just tuned it out,” said Ken Trump, a national school safety consultant in Cleveland. “When you start the gun control versus the gun rights debate, people just shut down. The conversation goes nowhere.”
So are schools safer than in 1966? How can one hope to secure a place that wasn’t built to military standards, and how would society pay for it even if that’s what most would want? Education already consumes the majority of Georgia’s budget.
Trump (no relation to President Donald Trump) notes that after two students killed fellow students at Columbine High School in 1999, a shocked nation got serious about school security.
There was federal money for training and hardware, but, as with many things, the concern was cyclical, and interest waned. For instance, schools got money to buy security cameras, "and then two or three years down the road, the cameras weren't working," Trump said. There wasn't money to maintain them.
Georgia has seen some of this. In 2010, the state got a $6 million federal subsidy to enhance school safety and drug education, the Georgia Department of Education reports. That dedicated funding stream has since dried up. There are dollars in other federal funds that could be used for safety, but safety competes with other educational needs.
Recognizing this, school leaders want to go in a different direction. They think new hardware or armed teachers — something some state legislatures have allowed — are an ineffective response.
“These are notions that are born of desperation,” said Bob Farrace, spokesman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “There are folks who just want to do something, and I get that. Let’s just not do something that makes the situation worse.”
Disturbed people with guns, it’s obvious by now, can be exceedingly difficult to stop. Since they’re often suicidal, they have an edge against a defender who hopes to survive, he said, which is “asking a lot of an educator who’s armed, even one who’s trained.”
Consultants like Trump think training teachers and students to hide until the police arrive will give them the best odds for survival. Meanwhile, school principals think better mental health services in schools to help identify potential shooters are the most logical line of defense, Farrace said.
The suspect in Las Vegas was said to be 64, well beyond his school years, but many shooters, including the one at Newtown, have been younger and, sometimes, students. What if they'd been flagged in school and given better services and more attention, Farrace said. What if federal dollars were instead spent to improve what schools already do with a handful of school counselors and psychologists for hundreds of students?
Early detection and early intervention, Farrace said: “There are things schools can do to resist the kind of crazy that exists out there.”
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