“Preventing School Shootings Starts with Gun Safety at Home

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Better Gun Safety at Home Can Prevent School Shootings School Safety. 2016. COPYRIGHT 2016 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text:

Article Commentary

Richard Aborn, “Preventing School Shootings Starts with Gun Safety at Home,” Christian Science Monitor, October 31, 2013. Copyright © 2013 Richard Aborn. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

“We will never be able to prevent all gun violence, but we can certainly do more as a society to prevent the most needless kind—and we can start with simple safety.”

Richard Aborn is the president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City. In the following viewpoint, Aborn argues that many school shootings are the result of children getting access to dangerous weapons. He says that better safety measures are needed. These should include better, more comprehensive education; research into why and how children access guns; and laws punishing adults for failure to keep guns from children. Aborn concludes that both gun rights and gun control advocates should be able to agree on better safety measures.

As you read, consider the following questions:

What school shooting incidents does Aborn describe to open his viewpoint?1. What are the circumstances of most shooting deaths in the home, according to Aborn?2. What are child access prevention laws, and what evidence does Aborn provide that they are effective?3.

A school shooting that left a teacher in Nevada dead last week [in October 2013] brings the number of such shootings in the United States to 17 since last December’s tragedy in Newtown, Conn. Also last week, a Washington State boy was arrested after he brought a gun and 400 rounds of ammunition to his middle school.

Keep Guns from Children

As Americans reflect on these horrifying events, we should also consider how preventable they were. In fact, many of the school shootings this year and in the past could have been prevented with just commonsense safety measures in the home—no new legislation or rules needed.

The gun used in the shooting in Sparks, Nevada—which left the teacher and the shooter, his 12-year-old student, dead and two classmates seriously wounded—was a Ruger 9mm semiautomatic handgun that was apparently taken by the child from his home. While it isn’t yet known exactly how he gained access to this dangerous weapon, it is highly likely that serious safety measures were not put in place by the parents, allowing an immature mind to once again wield terrible power.

In the last year, this devastating scenario has played out again and again. School shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown [Connecticut], Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn., in 2005, and Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., in 1997, also involved legal guns taken from the home, used by young people who clearly should not have been able to carry them to school as easily as they would a packed lunch. Sadly, it is perhaps more surprising that these incidents don’t occur more regularly. A 2005 study on firearm access in America showed that 1.69 million children under the age of 18 lived in homes with loaded and unlocked firearms.

Newtown, of course, was also made possible by a parent’s apparently irresponsible behavior as a gun owner. Although the shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, was not actually school-age when he murdered 26 people at the school, he had easy access to an armory of weapons, even though his own brother questioned Lanza’s competence and other relatives described him as “not well.”

Illegal guns should be America’s No. 1 public safety concern, and new laws are badly needed to eventually curb the violence they allow. But it is unacceptable that legal guns continue to be nearly as deadly as illegal guns when responsible firearm ownership is all that is needed to prevent many of those deaths. Not only are murders like the ones in Newtown and Sparks more likely to happen without better safety measures, but so are accidents: 89 percent of unintentional shooting deaths of children are in the home and usually when children are playing with a loaded gun without their parents present.

To fix this, Americans can take simple steps to block firearm access to children and to prevent the worst kind of carnage.

Better Gun Education Needed

First and foremost, a concerted effort among state governments, firearms dealers, law enforcement, health care workers, and gun manufacturers must be coordinated to ensure that as many gun owners receive basic safety information and warnings about irresponsible firearm storage as possible. Right now, there are various separate attempts at education, which are clearly insufficient. These groups can, and do, disagree mightily about the use and proliferation of guns in this country, but they can all certainly agree that targeted education to prevent so much death is badly needed. Together, under a unified message and strategy, they will be more successful.

Second, Americans must invest in more research to better understand why children use guns against others and how to stop them, including risk factors, incident triggers, and effective interventions. Part of this research must also focus on the increasing links between social media and juvenile violence, and how violent behavior online—such as taunting posts on Facebook and Instagram photos and videos—may interface with devastating real-world consequences.

Finally, there are legislative solutions to pursue as well. “Child access prevention” laws impose specific criminal liability on adults who negligently allow kids to access their firearms. Studies have shown that these laws reduce both unintentional firearm deaths and suicides of children in the states where they are enacted. Twenty-eight states have these laws.

The parents and relatives who have enabled children to use their guns to kill surely feel remorse, and may even face criminal and civil prosecution for their negligence. But Americans, too, should feel responsible when these heart-breaking deaths occur because we have not done enough, as a country, to prevent them.

We will never be able to prevent all gun violence, but we can certainly do more as a society to prevent the most needless kind—and we can start with simple safety.

Books

Nils Böckler, Thorsten Seeger, Peter Sitzer, and Wilhelm Heitmeyer, eds. School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention. New York: Springer, 2012. Dave F. Brown Why America’s Public Schools Are the Best Place for Kids: Reality vs. Negative Perceptions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012. Jeffrey W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014. Jarrett Conaway, ed. Public and School Safety: Risk Assessment, Perceptions and Management Strategies. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2014. E. Scott Dunlap, ed. The Comprehensive Handbook of School Safety. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013. Lawrence Fennelly and Marianna Perry The Handbook for School Safety and Security: Best Practices and Procedures. Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2014. James Alan Fox and Harvey Burstein Violence and Security on Campus: From Preschool Through College. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Annette Fuentes Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse. New York: Verso, 2011. Maegan E. Hauserman, ed. A Look at School Crime Safety. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. Ted Hayes If It’s Predictable, It’s Preventable: More than 2,000 Ways to Improve the Safety and Security in Your School. Mineral Point, WI: Little Creek Press, 2013. Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen Bully: An Action Plan for Teachers, Parents, and Communities to Combat the Bullying Crisis. New York: Weinstein Books, 2012. Shane R. Jimerson, Amanda B. Nickerson, Matthew J. Mayer, and Michael J. Furlong, eds. Handbook of School Violence and School Safety: International Research and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2012. Judith Kafka The History of “Zero Tolerance” in American Public Schooling. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Jessie Klein The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Paul Langan Bullying in Schools: What You Need to Know. West Berlin, NJ: Townsend Press, 2011. Peter Langman School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Peter Langman Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Matthew Lysiak Newtown: An American Tragedy. New York: Gallery, 2013. David C. May School Safety in the United States: A Reasoned Look at the Rhetoric. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2014. Kathleen Nolan Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Brian Schoonover Zero Tolerance Discipline Policies: The History, Implementation, and Controversy of Zero Tolerance Policies in Student Codes of Conduct. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009. Marc Thibault A Comprehensive School Safety Planning Manual. Frederick, MD: America Star Books, 2013. Paul Timm School Security: How to Build and Strengthen a School Safety Program. Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2014. Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, eds. Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Periodicals

Dewey G. Cornell “Gun Violence and Mass Shootings—Myths, Facts and Solutions,” Washington Post, June 11, 2014. Every Town for Gun Safety “150 School Shootings in America Since 2013,” October 3, 2015. Ashley Fantz, Lindsey Knight, and Kevin Wang “A Closer Look: How Many Newtown-Like School Shootings Since Sandy Hook?,” CNN, June 19, 2014. Husna Haq “Should Public Schools Teach How to Use Guns? Yes, Say South Carolina Legislators,” Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 2015. Patrick Lewis “Gun Safety Would Increase If It Was Taught in Our Schools,” Wyoming Tribune Eagle, May 7, 2015. Moms Demand Action and Mayors Against Illegal Guns “Analysis of School Shootings: December 15, 2012-February 10, 2014,” February 12, 2014. Bob Owens “Why Aren’t We Teaching Firearm Safety in School?,” Bearing Arms, July 24, 2014. Suzi Parker “Should Public Schools Teach Kids How to Handle Guns?” TakePart, February 20, 2013. Michele Richinick “Gun Violence in Schools Among Parents’ Main Concerns,” MSNBC, August 12, 2014. Valerie Strauss “The Alarming Number of School Shootings Since 2012 Killings in Newtown,” Washington Post, December 10, 2014.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Aborn, Richard. “Better Gun Safety at Home Can Prevent School Shootings.” School Safety, edited by Noah Berlatsky, Greenhaven Press, 2016.

Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010981215/OVIC?u=txshracd2500&sid=OVIC&xid=c512e608. Accessed 19 Sept. 2018. Originally published as “Preventing School Shootings Starts with Gun Safety at Home,” Christian Science Monitor, 31 Oct. 2013.

Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010981215