The Real Threat to School Security

A lonely high schooler picks up the gun in his father's shed one day. He's had enough of his life of what he considers failure, and he's decided to go out with a bang. He slips it in his backpack just before he catches the bus. He sits at the back where he won't be bothered by his peers. They never talk to him anyway.

The above is a shot of what might preceed a school shooting. When you were in school, or if you are in school now, note how there were and are always those few students without any friends. They walk around like zombies, tortured by their lack of connection with their fellow student. They may have made mention of 'getting back' at people to a confidant, but no one ever thought they'd go through with it.

That is, until the day when they become the raging maniac they have long threatened to become, pacing up and down the halls between classes, waiting for the bell to ring so they can have open-season with their peers--their prey.

The bell rings. Shots are fired. Screams are heard.

Certainly there are things that can be done to prevent a tradgedy like this. As it is now, school security, as often as it is emphasized immediately after one of the many school attacks that have occurred in recent years, can be improved vastly. There are many threats to security that go unnoticed, unseen, or, potentially even more deadly, ignored.

Where there is motive, there will always be opportunity. I don't care how secure your school thinks it is; there is always a gap that can be taken advantage of. And where there is pressure to act violently, eventually, that gap will be found, widened, and used to devastating effect. The more secure you think you are, the easier a target you are when you realize that there's a mad man running around your campus with a gun trying to pick off your friends, or even you.
Remove the motive, and you will negate any open opportunity. You could be teaching in a 10x10ft room, with loaded shotguns lined along the walls, but if all of the students are happy and wish no harm to each other, violence is not going to occur, regardless of whether or not there are the loaded shotguns. This, of course, is just an example.

What can be done? you might ask.

You could have random student strip searches. You could have specially trained dogs all over campus all the time. You could ban jackets or articles of clothing that could potentially be used to conceal weapons. You could have daily searching of student backpacks for weapons. Windows could be made bulletproof, doors could be reinforced in any manner of ways, and teachers could be dealt out tazers or pepper spray for use in a situation.

You can vamp up the campus with all sorts of goodies: metal detectors, strip searches, x-ray machines, student identification cards...even, to stretch the point further, something like daily questioning on a per-student basis with a polygraph. Eventually someone will find a place to work: a way to hide a knife under specially-padded clothing; a way to break the metal detectors; some back-door to the campus that students don't usually know about.

What can be done? you might ask, again.

Have counselors on-site. If someone's looking distressed or extremely hostile to the verge of mentally snapping, give them the go-ahead to go take a walk, get a drink of water, and come back when they're feeling better. Don't dismiss them from their assignments of the day, but at the same time don't allow pressure to build up to intense hate-generating levels. The problem is stress, anxiety, and peer interaction. Little can be done about peer interaction. Stress and anxiety, however, can be dealt with, at least in part.

Where there's a will, there's a way. And you know it's true.