Safety is an illusive perception. When a person believes he is safe from danger, he remains vulnerable to the threat that he cannot conceive. When a person believes he is threatened by danger, while he is more sensitive to all potential threats, he is prisoner to each of the safety precautions constructed against every threat he can conceive. Yet, the danger lies in the threat that has not been conceived. Vulnerable and imprisoned is the current state of safety in our schools. If we cannot be safe, we must be safer.
We need to be honest when we deal with illusions. While no honest person would choose to do nothing in response to the murder taking place in and around school houses, no honest person should attach himself to “we must assure that this never happens again” action. There is no action that can be legislated by school boards, state houses or congresses that will assure that murder will never ever happen again. Never cannot be legislated. And, legislation, even responsive to tragic murder, remains political. Left to legislators, safety and school house safety, in particular, is a political action in the name of safety. Tragically, harm to people in school will happen again.
That said, we must work the margins of our illusions of how to make school houses safer. Safer is the operative word. Safer is the aggregate of our preventive and responsive measures. Safer includes actions to screen access to school property to prevent danger from entering and to issue tourniquet supplies to classrooms to be applied after injuries have occurred. Safer is rehearsing active shooter practices and advocating “see something – say something” procedures to address persons in of assistance before tragedy strikes. Safer is paying for a police presence in and around school houses to either dissuade a murderer or to assure that a school house attack is “death by school house attack.” Sad it is to even write that last sentence.
Safer is not placing school in a prison-bubble. Safer is not going Wild West and issuing guns to school staff. Safer is not metal screening every student entering the school house every morning, an hours-long process, or every parent visiting school, or every patron at a school event. Safer is not building impenetrable walls around school children – what will we do with school buses and on school field trips? Safer is not raising the imprisoning measures that morph a school house into a malfunctioning “safe” house.
Because we will never be capable of assuring school house murder never ever happens again, we must reasonably work to make school houses safer. Safer, when completely safe is impossible, is a better place to be.