Do you think adequate measures are being taken by the school district to prevent school shootings?
Yes:10 No:6

For most of us, the occurrence of a school shooting is little more than a nightmare, but for those at West High, it almost became reality. On Friday, October 10th, someone brought a gun to West High. As shocking as it is, firearms and shootings in schools have become an epidemic. 86 school shootings have occurred since the Sandy Hook shooting in December of 2012, an average of 3-4 per month. Three of them have occurred in Iowa.

Three-fourths of weapons used in these shootings were unsecured weapons from home. While imposing strict restrictions on firearms is considered extreme and will never happen while organizations like the NRA are so prevalent, simply requiring all firearms to be secured within the home would prevent the majority of these incidents. I wonder how many parents have thought back to the gun left under a pillow and wondered whether if they had locked that weapon away, the world might not be short as many young sons and daughters.

As random as these terrible events seem, there are steps that are being taken by City High and district administrators to prevent shootings and to be prepared if one happens. City High teachers are amazing, and do their best to have good relationships with all their students. Since communication with students and with the community is key to becoming aware of and preventing potentially violent situations the school has implemented a system to make sure that every student feels appreciated and known by teachers. In the teachers lounge there are class lists posted on the walls with the names of every student at City High. Teachers are encouraged to cross off the list names of kids who they have talked to and have good relationships with. This way it is easy to see who is accounted for and who is left out.

In addition to preventing shootings through maintaining good relationships with City High students, teachers are trained in what to do if an actual shooting emergency were to occur. Since the terrible shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut the department of education has worked hard to make sure that every teacher in the country is trained on how to deal with an active shooter. The system is called Alice which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate. The Alice system was in place before Sandy Hook but has been completely re-designed in the last two years. In the summer before school started in 2013 City High teachers attended a training session at City High designed to prepare them for a real shooting. Teachers were placed in their normal classrooms while police officers walked around the school shooting guns with blanks in them. Teachers were told what to do and became much more familiar with their rooms safety features, and are now more prepared for a real shooting.

While safety measures are fine and good once the situation is upon us, we have to understand that preventing school shooters is ultimately up to us. We have to get away from a school community where each of us lives in our own form of isolation. The situation at West ended without a killing because someone had it in them to talk to this person. How many of these would-be killers could be pacified if someone simply asked them how they’re doing? We are all guilty, and we have all failed these poor people. Every school in America likes to promote the idea of a unified community. Perhaps it’s time we lived up to that ideal by treating those within our school, everyone, as part of a community. It’s lazy to chock all of this up to simple insanity. Perhaps if we could talk to these people, we would hear a story about loneliness, bitterness, but most of all about a lack of compassion. A story about how no one cares. These people rage within their own minds while the world around them continues to turn, unabated, and those around them continue with their lives completely oblivious to the pain and woe of one of their classmates. Often the only difference between a horrific spree of violence and a crisis averted is …one person’s compassion to break that terrible system of silence. People don’t want to talk about it. They look into the eyes of someone so afflicted and are terrified by what they see there. It’s said that the eyes are the windows of the soul. A look into a soul so filled with lonesomeness and rage is enough to rattle anyone. If anything will ever change, we need to change how we think, how we operate. We cannot simply leave each other to the wolves of “not my problem.” Thankfully for those at West High that day, for all of us, someone had it in them to ask when they saw a person at their breaking point. We could all stand to take a lesson.