I won’t blame the school for not checking the kid’s backpack, but I will say that I think such would have been reasonable in this circumstance. Not just for guns—maybe he had something else that he was planning to use to harm himself or others. If it’s bad enough to call in the parents and counselling, I think a quick look through the bag is prudent and could be backed up under the Fourth Amendment.
I don’t blame the school, however, as I also acknowledge that I might not have thought of this at the time.
Also, one other thing I’ll throw into this post:
@pkbites: I think we have some common ground here. The one thing I hate about the self-styled “Second Amendment activists” is that they seem to want to neuter or repeal current gun laws. The lack of enforcement of existing laws is definitely a problem, and passing new laws wouldn’t mean much if we don’t fix that underlying problem of getting the laws enforced.
I can get behind putting more effort into enforcing the laws we currently have. That’s not how I initially interpreted your sarcastic post listing the laws not being enforced—I thought you were trying to argue that the problem was intractable, as that’s an argument I’ve heard before from the gun rights side.
I agree it could play out like that in many schools with a strong disciplinary action rather than compassion. I would rather see the adult take a less dramatic approach in asking to go through a student’s belongings and de escalate the tension bring some empathy and understanding to the situation.That takes time, resources which may be in short supply. I know there is a desperate need for social worker type professionals in schools.
There is no universe in which “I am now going to search your bag for weapons” can be done compassionately.
ETA: searching everyone’s bag at the door is at least dispassionate. But a targeted search after an emergency removal from class? That says “I don’t trust you. I think you, personally, could be a monster”.
That’s a grossly distorted interpretation of what I’m saying. The position that I’m taking here – partly in a determined effort to avoid this devolving into the usual gun control debate, and partly in recognition that any changes in the gun-proliferation landscape are going to take a very long time – is centered around the question of what schools should do given the current tragic reality of guns in America.
I stated that position upthread but I’ll state it again. Schools have only two options: (1) further extend current precautionary policies toward absolutely zero tolerance of potential threats, or (2) accept that there will be more school shootings and more tragic deaths. I’m seeing this from the perspective of a different country, where from my perspective the US appears like a gun-infested war zone, and where therefore schools really do have to enact extraordinary measures to stay safe. The numerous copycat threats that caused the complete shutdown of dozens of Michigan schools in the aftermath of this, even if most or all of them were not credible, is itself an indication of how pervasive the problem is, and how attractive to psychopaths the option of easy mass killing with a semi-automatic is.
My reference to airport security is simply to show that we have policies and technologies that can be adapted to better secure schools, and that in the final analysis, the options available to schools are some variant of (1) or (2). Make your choice.
On a different topic, I have to say that when I look at this kid who did this horrible thing, my main emotion is not hate, but a deep, deep sorrow. His parents are total assholes, total scum who I hope rot in jail for the rest of their lives. His parents failed him. The American gun culture failed him. He’s a 15-year-old troubled kid who badly needed psychological help. The last thing on God’s earth that he needed was a semi-automatic pistol. When the fuck will they ever learn?
Searching someone’s bag out of their presence and without their knowledge is a whole other thing. The cops can’t do that, even with probable cause, unless they show that they have a very good reason. I don’t think this has ever been tested in schools, but if I were a principal I would want a district lawyer to give me permission, and as a teacher I just would never do that.
Again, if it seemed that likely that he had a gun, they should have sent him home. But they had no reason to think he did.
Based on the proportion of time that children spend in school, it seems to me that the conclusion is that schools are doing an excellent job in keeping their students safe. 40 children shot per annum in any other nation would be a crisis. But in the context of overall U.S. gun violence, it seems like a remarkable low number. We’re susceptible here to a fallacy similar to the belief that air travel is dangerous because spectacular isolated events hit the headlines.
Furthermore - this thread isn’t a general gun debate, but it also should not be a general debate about any aspect of parenting that does not specifically relate to how this teenager gained easy access to a gun. What matters is how people in general have such easy unregulated access to firearms whether inside school or elsewhere, and why (for example) as @pkbites has pointed out violations of existing law are rarely punished adequately. Because general errors of parenting and errors of school administration are inevitable, but they rarely have devastating irreversible consequences unless the disturbed teenager has access to a gun.
Also, it might be easy to say “well, if he didn’t have a gun, you’d never have to let him know, and if he did, that would be way more important than technicalities”.
But a lot of stuff falls in the middle. What if he had marijuana? Pills? Pornography? Additional disturbing drawings? A list of girls he wanted to fuck? A list of kids he hated?
There could be a bunch of profoundly problematic stuff in there, and a surreptitious search just creates a nightmare of conflicts of interest.
No, as you mention that is already what’s happening. And you are as I said focusing on the security-centric/punitive approach. What I meant was something more on the lines of:
But yes, however that may be, it still leaves out the issues: just how did the student get to wander around the school building with a gun in the backpack and in what planet do parents conculde that arming an angsty kid is the way to give him a pick-me-up from his teen distress. And in that, I must mildly disagree with @Riemann’s comment
… only insofar as any measure to prevent that, should be part of a more general set of policy and procedure. “Prevent him from having a gun in the school” is not enough; “prevent kids from having guns” and “enforce the existing laws” are very useful first steps – lowering the potential death toll – but still leave us needing to address the underlying issues, and yes those are mental health issues.
And I don’t envy the people in charge of reading the “red flags” – can’t be that every angry social media shitpost or MandaJo’s lists in the notebook means the house gets raided and any guns taken away. Gonna be one mess of an implementation
We cannot aspire to rid the world of mental health issues, and I’m not aware of any evidence that U.S. teenagers have a significantly higher incidence of emotional disturbance than anywhere else.
The “underlying issue” is not mental health, it is easy access to firearms. We can aspire to make it much more difficult for anyone - including someone in a mental health crisis - to inflict devastating irreversible harm on others (or themselves).
But the majority of Americans have made the choice that this is not something they want, if it makes it slightly more difficult to own a firearm. That’s not the choice I’d make, but it’s what most Americans prefer. And anyone with this view needs to accept and own the obvious and inevitable consequences, not wring their hands about a mental health crisis or poor parenting skills or a school administration sometimes missing “red flags”.
The story I see emerging, in the media, is that the kid aspired to be a video game designer. The parents encouraged this goal. The mothers’ caution to ‘not get caught’ simply referred to the fact that others would misinterpret his interests and his sketches of planned game scenarios. There was nothing wrong with what the school observed. It was their child preparing for his chosen vocation.
I’ve missed a few post so I am not sure if this had been covered. Could not the school have checked his bag with a metal detector when he was in the office with his parents? Would such a scan have given the school further cause to do a search without violating the students rights? At the very least they could have separated the bag from him and his parents and asked for a warrant. I’m thinking most schools have hand held metal detectors in this day and age.
We don’t have a hand held metal detector. Just the ones you walk through. And, again, what do you do if it goes off? You are just back to where you started.
Bags don’t go through the metal detector, at my school. At the door, they open the bags and glance in. We don’t have the personal to do more than that.