When I was in banking, I had a colleague who was the son of a European business mogul. Those of us who grew up in modest circumstances found his life astounding; I’ve never forgotten him explaining how, when executive kidnap-and-ransom took off in the 1970s, he was taken to and from school by a bodyguard.
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Last week in Newport News, Virginia, a teacher was shot and critically injured at school by a six-year-old student with a gun.
It doesn’t seem possible to follow the dreadful absurdity of that sentence with anything meaningful. But of course we have to try to make meaning from it. What does it mean that a child that young got their hands on a gun and brought it to school? That the shooting was allegedly no accident? That a roomful of first-graders watched their teacher get shot, saw a classmate pull the trigger, heard their teacher yell for them to run?
For parents, of course, the urgent question is how to protect their children. In Newport News, parents are clamoring for the schools to do more. Some are citing what looks like a trend in the district: multiple shooting incidents in the past few years. But this isn’t a problem unique to Newport News. School shootings have skyrocketed nationwide.
What is the “more” that some Newport News parents are asking for? They want the district to install metal detectors, hire more security guards, require clear backpacks. They want tangible and immediate security fixes, the kind we’ve become familiar with from other gathering places like concerts and sporting arenas. In various states, we’ve seen demands for and laws facilitating the arming of teachers, a notion not far removed from seeking a bodyguard for every child while in a school.
Schools can do many things to help children stay and feel safe. The fundamental problem is that the schools in question are in America, where we aren’t able to keep children safe anywhere from the threat of gun violence, a leading cause of child death. Even if metal detectors in schools were proven effective (they haven’t been), this would do nothing to protect children or adults from the terror and trauma wrought by guns elsewhere: Schools can’t prevent the gun violence happening outside them.
This is not a school problem. This is a gun problem.
No number of fixes, no amount of security funding can solve it. Imagining that every child in America was provided a magnate’s personal security detail to accompany them to and from and at every place they go — a bodyguard for schools, playgrounds, movie theaters, festivals, stores, houses of worship — only reveals the absurdity of security measures as our primary answer.
And when children are at home? Most mass shootings are linked to domestic violence; just last week a man murdered his five children, wife, and mother-in-law at the family home before turning the gun on himself.
Wherever they happen, most shootings are not mass shootings — many are accidents, suicides, homicides or attempts involving one or two people like the Virginia six-year-old’s appears to be — but the availability of guns and their under-regulation makes all shootings more likely.
There is a critical sense in which America’s gun culture is holding us hostage. We can learn something then from the counterterrorism experts who deal with hostage-takers. The Global Counterterrorism Forum produced a guide to best practices in fighting kidnapping and ransom. Its advice is based on a key imperative: to “deny terrorists the financial and other benefits of these actions.”
Following this advice requires disincentivizing those actors who profit financially, politically, and socially from the proliferation of guns and the gun violence that flows from that — and making it harder for them to do so. The list of these actors is long and includes the NRA; gun manufacturers and sellers; extremist politicians here and abroad; and extremist pundits, conspiracy propagandists, and other ideological profiteers.
I almost didn’t write this piece today because there seems to be nothing new to say. Gun violence in our country seems to just keep getting worse, making it easy to collapse into hopelessness, to do no more than re-post that evergreen Onion piece.
But there has been recent progress, among it the $1.4 billion in damages against Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who profited from spreading fear among gun owners through lies about Sandy Hook and the 2022 gun safety bill that was the first major federal law to better regulate guns to pass in three decades.
Every horrific incident and every battle won should spur us forward to help those who are fighting the fight by donating, volunteering, lending them our voices. A list of organizations follows. Some of them are organizations fighting gerrymandering and other anti-democratic forces that are preventing the views and needs of the vast majority regarding guns from being acted upon by our government.
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