Parents and administrators will be considering potentially invasive security measures at schools here after a 13-year-old student fired an assault rifle in a middle school yesterday and was talked into leaving without injuring anyone only after the gun jammed.
School officials in this small southwest Missouri city said the close call will certainly spark a debate about whether to tighten access and add security checks in a district of 7,000 students that now has one full-time policeman and some drug enforcement officers who roam between schools.
Gov. Matt Blunt, who was in Joplin yesterday for a meeting, said because of the recent spate of school violence it would be worth considering proposals from lawmakers to allow teachers to carry firearms in schools.
"It’s an interesting idea worth discussing," Blunt said.
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Simpson said police told him the boy had a fascination with the deadly Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, but police declined to verify that information.Farmer said police were not aware of any motivation for the shooting.
He said the weapon belonged to the suspect’s parents, who had the rifle in a gun safe at home. The parents told police they didn’t think their son knew the combination to the safe but that he apparently did. Police said it was not uncommon for people in the area to own assault weapons.
Two questions, actually: 1) The way to decrease violence is to involve more weapons? Right. That always works. 2) How in the world are they going to put these guns in a place where the teacher can easily get to them in an emergency...but a student can’t figure out a way to get them? A 7th-grader figured out his parents’ safe combination; I’m pretty sure they’d figure out a way to get to a teacher’s stashed gun. Only now, they wouldn’t even have to figure out how to bring a gun into school...it’s already at school waiting for them.
Okay, a third (and slightly less serious) question: I’ve heard of some pretty crazy teachers in my lifetime...do we trust THEM to have easy access to a gun in the middle of a trying school day? But I digress.
School safety is a tricky (and scary) issue...but I’m pretty sure bringing more weapons onto the premises is a 100% wrong way of solving the issue. That would be about as stupid as, say, killing 600,000 innocent citizens of a sovereign nation in the attempt to rid them of oppression and make them love us. And we'd never be stupid enough to try that.
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