Next Time????

This week marks the one year anniversary of the Santa Fe high school shooting in Houston. Today on the news there were stories about the shooting. There were stories about some of the survivors a year later and their memories of the shooting. There were were stories about how Texas schools and Texas government have addressed school safety.

Every single measure that has been taken has focused on additional preparation for an “active shooter scenario”. This included things like adding more security personnel, adding more metal detectors and more training for teachers and students. In other words everything that has been done has been totally focused on being more prepared for Next Time.

Next Time??
Is that where we are now? Resigned that there has to be a Next Time?
What this says to me is that the United States has accepted school shootings as a new and unavoidable norm. That we have made the statement that we can’t prevent this from happening, all we can do is prepare to try to limit the damage.
Have we really given up on trying to make the most recent school shooting the last school shooting?
Have we just accepted that there is going to be a Next Time and nothing we do will change that?

The report talked about Santa Fe High School having been considered a model of preparedness right up until a pissed off 17 year old proved that you will never be able to cover every detail of every scenario. The president of the board of trustees for the district which contains Santa Fe is on record saying that the district's policies and procedures worked. As the Denver post reported afterwards Santa Fe school had a shooting plan, armed officers, and practice. And still 10 people died. But in typical fashion the response has been to look at rectifying specific failures like substitute teachers not having keys to classroom and safe room doors and remodeling to get rid of windows in classroom doors. There is also a plan to upgrade the school police officers’ weapons to include AR-15s.

As far as I can tell the Santa Fe shooting wasn’t even a blip in the national debate about gun control. In this case the guns used were a shotgun and handgun both legally owned by the shooter’s father. No assault weapons were involved and since it is unthinkable that we might change regulations on shotguns or handguns, why even talk about gun control? Aside being unwilling to consider regulating gun ownership we can’t even seem to talk about what responsible gun ownership would look like. I have seen no mention made of how the guns or ammunition were stored or that they were apparently accessible to the 17 year old. If anything the guns being legally owned, non-assault weapons has been held up as evidence that there was no way this could have been prevented.

I’ll have to go back and check, but I’m pretty sure the second amendment does not say that anyone has a right to be utterly irresponsible about who has access to their firearms.