A recent Courant
editorial, “Sandy Hook Panel's Focus Turns From Guns To School Safety,” begins with the following lede: “Officials
can turn a school into an armed camp, in an effort to make it safer, with metal
detectors, bulletproof glass, armed guards and armed teachers. Or they can take
a different approach.”
Naturally, the
Courant, which is averse to “armed camps,” prefers a different approach.
Schools “can promote good basic building security measures for access and
corridor control. They can train faculty and staff to embrace the post-9/11 mantra: If you see something, say something.
They can make smaller-scale changes that are easier to implement and pay for,
such as more security cameras and, importantly, help for troubled students.”
Will this solution
work in Connecticut schools? The obvious corollary question is: Work to do
what? We were told by an assortment of politicians days after Adam Lanza shot
his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School that Connecticut and the nation at
large would have to craft legislation to prevent such events from happening in
the future. All the decision making politicians in Connecticut jumped on that
band wagon. Their script appeared to have been written somewhere in central
casting, so uniform was it.
The first line in
the editorial carries a load of unsupported rhetorical freight. Who are the
politicians in Connecticut who said after the assault on the school they wanted
to turn all Connecticut schools into “armed camps.” This was a rhetorical spook
under the bed from day one. And the other rhetorical spook on a stick was the
AR-15 “assault weapon.” An assault weapon is any weapon used successfully in an
assault. Lanza arrived at the school armed to the teeth. He left an semi-automatic
shot gun – an assault weapon? – in the trunk of his car, shot his way into the
school with the AR-15, and committed suicide when armed first responders
appeared on the scene.
That is what we
THINK happened; we are still awaiting a criminal report from the state police
and Danbury State Attorney Stephen Sedensky III, months after we were told it would be
available by mid-June. In this particular incident, one wants to know whether
“corridor control,” or a staff prepared to “say something” after they’ve seen
something, or any of the “smaller-scale changes that are easier to implement
and pay for, such as more security cameras and, importantly, help for troubled
students,” would have altered the turn of events.
To ask the question
is to answer it. These measures may be proper and advisable, but Adam Lanza
would have brushed by them quickly during his murderous assault.
Among the first
people Lanza shot when he broke into the school was school psychologist Mary Sherlach who, under happier circumstances, would have been
pleased to sit down with Lanza to ease his psychological burdens. On this occasion, she was not a bar to his
murderous intentions. And frankly we should be prepared to acknowledge that an
“armed camp” might have been an effective preventative – even though we are not
prepared to turn every school in the state into am armed camp. The first
responders, whose appearance in the school brought a stop to the mayhem, were
not armed with Freudian text books, and they were successful in thwarting more
slayings BECAUSE they were armed.
Sherlach and Sandy Hook Principal Dawn Hochsprung were the heroes of the day. No song about heroism can be sung loud enough to do them justice. They both put themselves in the line of fire to save their students, and they are rightfully remembered as heroes who, in laying down their lives, showed the greatest love possible. So too with the first responders who put themselves in harm’s way to save the lives of blameless little children: They were all heroes. But the first responders, we ought to remember, were successful BECAUSE they were armed.
Sherlach and Sandy Hook Principal Dawn Hochsprung were the heroes of the day. No song about heroism can be sung loud enough to do them justice. They both put themselves in the line of fire to save their students, and they are rightfully remembered as heroes who, in laying down their lives, showed the greatest love possible. So too with the first responders who put themselves in harm’s way to save the lives of blameless little children: They were all heroes. But the first responders, we ought to remember, were successful BECAUSE they were armed.
According to the editorial, it is good that the commission appointed by
Governor Dannel Malloy, a 16-member panel of experts charged with studying “measures to improve school security, mental
health services and gun violence prevention,” has taken sufficient time to
compile its report, because the state thereby “avoided the panicked response
seen in a few parts of the country of arming teachers, which is a potentially
greater risk than the one it is supposed to prevent.”
Courant editors
should be challenged to cite a serious piece of legislation proposed by anyone
in the Connecticut’s General Assembly that would arm teachers.
That has happened
elsewhere in the nation. The nation’s federalist structure is such that it
allows states to serve as experimental stations, and in time we will see
whether arming teachers is a more successful measure in turning away school
assaults than, say, the psychological profiling of students.
It’s telling that
the paper is lobbying for “sufficient time” so that the panel of experts might
create a state-wide camp of psychologists armed with predictive models to
prevent future Sandy Hook-like assaults, even as the paper eagerly joined in the
PANICKED rush for legislation that preceded the criminal report everyone is
still waiting for. An indeterminate date has now been assigned to the release
of that report. The Courant permitted itself to wonder in a previous editorial
what the hang-up is, since it is unlikely anyone else will be charged in the
crime.
The gun legislation
so far passed by the General Assembly does not rely on the necessary hard data
that would have been available to legislators had a preliminary criminal report
been released earlier in camera to legislators who, rushed by political
exigencies, were in the process of
creating a comprehensive gun restriction bill. Heeding common sense, the
editors at the Courant should have understood early on that the way to build a legislative
sand castle in the air is to deprive legislators of the hard data – the ground
– that is necessary in all sound legislation.
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