DISCLOSURE: This is an opinion article. Please note that unsigned editorials represent the collective opinion of The Wingspan student news staff and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the adviser or Gretna East High School. Columns represent the opinion of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the adviser, the Wingspan staff or Gretna East High School.
It’s discussed like the weather on the nightly news. It’s just another everyday occurrence: school shootings.
The U.S. has become so used to hearing about all of the different shootings that it no longer shocks anyone when it comes on the news. This needs to change; the U.S. needs to care for its students and put laws in place to protect them and keep schools safe.
Homicide is the second leading cause of death for teenagers, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). One contributor to that statistic is school shootings; there have been 158 school shootings this year, and there were 336 last year.
This is a pattern that has to stop; kids should not live in fear, making plans for what they would do if there were ever to be a shooter in their school. Teachers should not need to have blackout curtains on their windows so that an attacker can not see how many are inside. Parents should not feel the need to put a bulletproof backpack insert in their children’s backpacks.
The answer to stopping school shootings is not to make students carry clear backpacks, hang blackout curtains or have more security in the buildings. This is because the average school shooter is not a high school student. It is a 34.4-year-old white male, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, an organization that conducts nonpartisan research and policy analysis. How would curtains or backpacks help prevent school shooting injuries and fatalities if the shooter isn’t even a high school student?
However, every time actual solutions are proposed, those who are staunch supporters of the Second Amendment get all up in arms (pun intended).
The Second Amendment, which allows U.S. citizens to own guns, was written in 1791, when, according to the National Archives, guns could only shoot about two musket balls per minute by a skilled militia member. In today’s time, an AR-15, which can fire 45-60 rounds per minute with ammunition magazines that can hold up to 100 rounds, is one of the most commonly used guns in school shootings, according to Vanderbilt University, which has an Active Shoot Response webpage that was created to educate students in how to respond to an active shooter. The fact that a webpage is needed says enough about our country’s state of affairs when it comes to the frequency of school shootings.
Regardless, there is a huge difference between the two styles of guns. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and eventually the Bill of Rights, they wrote it for the slow-loading, single-shot guns of their time, not today’s rapid-fire killing machines.
Clearly, our guns have evolved over time, and with that, so should our laws concerning them. We need laws that do not take away the Second Amendment, because it is important at its roots, but instead put parameters on the types of guns average citizens can own, and put more emphasis on who is qualified to own them or not.
This is not a new idea. Our neighbors to the north, Canada, reformed their gun laws after a shooting in 1989, where a student killed 14 other students.
Canada separated their plan into three different classes of weapons according to a global comparison of gun policies done by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR): non-restricted weapons, which include ordinary rifles and shotguns; restricted weapons, including handguns and semiautomatic weapons; and prohibited weapons, which include automatic weapons, making it illegal to own a fully automatic weapon unless it was registered before 1978.
This is not all that Canada has done to stop school shootings. According to Canada’s Firearms Act, they also have a 28-day waiting period for first-time firearms license applicants, where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police conducts security screening and background checks on the applicant, including a review of their criminal records, mental health and references provided by the applicant. Additionally, they require applicants to be 18 years of age or older to apply for their possession and acquisition license, and before they can even apply, they must take the Canadian Firearms Safety Course.
This is what needs to be brought into the US, not the weak attempts to make it seem like lawmakers and politicians actually care about students’ safety. An example of this is the School Violence Prevention Act bill, which was introduced to the House on June 6. This, in the most basic terms, calls for grants to help create programs within schools that have been identified as having a high risk of being involved in gun violence. The programs focus on teaching students to regulate their emotions and to have empathy for others. This is not a feasible solution, especially since the typical school shooter doesn’t attend the school they attack.
Additionally, the type of people who shoot innocent children intentionally do not need some kind of counseling session to talk about their hopes and feelings. People who have the urge to murder need more than counseling. That, and while discussing mental health and acknowledging that mental health is important, when it comes to trying to prevent school shootings, it’s not what is best for students.
Noam Shpancer, Ph.D., psychology professor at Otterbein University, says as much in an article in Psychology Today that focusing on mental health will not prevent school shootings.
“One thing an improved mental health system would not be likely to do is prevent school shootings,” Shpancer said. “Associating mental illness with mass murder serves mainly to increase the stigma already plaguing mental illness. Statistically, mental illness is a poor predictor of violent behavior. The notion that mental illness causes mass shootings serves to further stereotype a large, diverse, and largely nonviolent, law-abiding population of people diagnosed with psychiatric conditions.”
The only way to actually stop this is to make stronger laws regarding the weapons that are killing kids: guns. This is a reality that Canada was able to realize; sitting in a circle talking about feelings isn’t the solution.
Canada’s policy has worked; the numbers don’t lie. According to the White House Archives, the other G7 countries, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, had a combined total of five recorded school shootings from 2009 to 2018. Yet, during the same time period, America averaged six shootings every two and a half months.
That’s approximately 260 school shootings in nine years in the US. The other six countries combined had a total of five in the same timespan. That’s 52 times more school shootings in the U.S. in comparison to the other six combined. This clearly illustrates that the US is doing something wrong.
Our country is not progressing, and in some cases, we are actually regressing. For example, in 2023, Nebraska revoked the requirement to have a concealed carry permit, so gun owners can now carry a gun with no permit or training, making it even easier for someone to walk around fully armed undetected.
While lawmakers seem to be taking us back a few steps when it comes to gun legislation, local students want to take steps forward.
Last month, Omaha Central High School students took a stand against gun violence and organized a walkout to protest school shootings and gun violence. Sophomore Lux Aven helped organize the Students Demand Action walkout to bring attention to what students want to see changed in the legislation regarding school shootings.
“I really care about this because this affects more kids today,” Aven said. “If we don’t fix it now, it’s going to get worse, and soon our kids will die. No one is stopping anyone from walking into our schools and killing innocent children.”
Those who are directly impacted by the threat of school shootings want change, but that change can’t happen if the U.S. government decides that its priority is keeping the gun market alive instead of making sure that schools aren’t turned into shooting ranges and children are the targets.
We can help make this happen, at least locally. Write, call or email your senator asking them to step up and protect us, the youth of Nebraska. Ask them to make and or support bills that would change the trajectory of the country’s school shooting stats for the better.
To find out who your senator is so you can contact them, click this link.
