New Pew Research paper titled: About 1 in 4 U.S. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lock-down in the last school year
I don’t know about you, but the title is a punch in the gut. And really shows how out of control US gun ownership has become. Which brings me to the middle of the report, after you read how often they have lock-downs, real threats etc….
Pew asked the teachers it was polling what they think the solutions should be.
- Improve mental health screening and treatment.
(My personal take, if people are not mentally healthy or they are children they should not have access to guns)
- Police Officers at school or Metal Detectors
This one surprised me, at no shooting at a school did the Police Officers make a difference, why so many teachers thought this would help escapes me. Also, Police in school increases violence against the kids, and more kids getting arrested due to events that don’t involve guns.
At the end of the report, it redid the outcomes of the poll based on teachers’ political leanings. That part was not surprising.
But what I was really surprised about is in the Strategies section, the option of tightening gun controls was not listed.
The issue is the guns, mentally ill people are everywhere, young minds are immature everywhere – the rate of gun deaths is related to how many guns people have. The same movies, videos, social problems, illness are universal across the world, the only factor that is really different is how difficult it is to get guns.
Until we stop all the other strategies, because they will never work, and focus on guns it won’t get better – the last paragraphs are my opinion they were not mentioned in the poll.