While I fully agree with banning assault weapons, as someone who volunteers hundreds of hours working with kids in a high school, I will tell you that the best thing to stop the madness of middle and high school shooters is prevention.
If the federal government can borrow $13.5T to pay back (off) the Koch Brothers, then they surely can help fund a program to put a mental health professional or two in every middle and high school in the United States.
Guidance counselors try to fill that role, but they are bogged down with a lot of other work, including high school class selections, college applications, and a small ocean of paperwork that most school districts impose.
Many teachers and counselors are great and sympathetic ears, but the vast majority have no mental health training, or the time to devote to kids with exceptional needs, although they do, often on their own time and dime, because they care.
Some schools have psychologists, but most are trained to work with special needs kids in terms of learning issues, not deal with more complex mental health and social interaction problems or grief counseling.
When your kid is hurt, or sick, they go to the school nurse. When there is an academic problem they seek out guidance. If your kid has a special need, schools have systems for dealing with learning issues. We need mental health professionals trained to work with the specific needs of adolescents and young adults.
I also ran the American Gun Victims Wall on facebook for a year after the Sandy Hook shooting, tracking every gun injury or death for twelve months. So many gun-related tragedies are the violence-amplification of simple origins.
- Arguments.
- Perceived sleights.
- Loss of control.
- Love lost.
- Impaired judgement.
- Fear of others
- Gravitation to violence as the drug of choice to answer a life need.
- Loss of all hope.
Well before a student starts collecting up weapons at gun shows, or marches into a school, semi-automatic AR-15 blazing, if there were resources for them, on campus, to talk to a mental health professional, many general fights, suicides, shootings, and even mass murders could be averted.
At the elementary school level, you won’t expect a troubled kid to show up looking for help. A friend, though, talking about how they went to a house where their host was torturing animals, might trigger a response that could intervene in the early stages of trouble.
At the middle and high schools, someone dealing with fights over emotional spats that are part of growing up could help improve campus life overall, reducing fights, acts of revenge, or helping people address feelings of anger, loss, or hopelessness.
Which is why mental health professionals need to be in every school. Many of the behavioral patterns, responses to adverse events at home, or in a neighborhood, form in elementary school.
Our only remedy now for behavioral issues is suspension. Crime and punishment. Often, the reason that a student is acting out, ditching, even fighting, is more complicated. It has deep emotional and psychological roots. Our kids must have professionals trained to address those needs.
Some parents, especially parents whose own behavior may contribute to the problems of a student going to school, oppose having mental health counseling available in the schools. People with strong religious beliefs fear that someone will “brainwash” their child into thinking differently than they do. In a public institution, the rights of the many prevail.
If parents commit violence on a child, that should not be tolerated by society. If parents send a student to a public school, their faith should be fully respected and the student should be contextually aware that equal respect is accorded to every other person, even if they do not share that world view.
A few parents, sadly, encourage their children to embrace violence as a form of interpersonal relations, or as a power-cocktail to deal with the world. If it is brought into the school by their children, it should be identified by a school mental health professional to the county’s social welfare system, and the school’s administration. The school’s mental health staffer should do whatever is possible under district policy and law to help that student stay in the lane of good conduct. If they can’t then the school district has iron-clad rationale as to why they need to be expelled.
It took decades to get federal laws passed to protect people with special needs. It took another two or three decades to get professionals who work with special needs kids. We’ve been in need of easy-access mental health in our public schools just as long.
The tragedy at Stoneman Douglas is a teachable moment. So many people knew a little bit about Nikolas Cruz. If the school had a mental health professional, then the administration would have been able to task someone to work with him, who might have been able to get him into mental health treatment earlier, and monitor his progress, talk to him, try to keep him from gravitating downward. It can save lives by changing lives, well before we get to the point that a new Mr. Cruz decides to conduct hisvown personal Valentine’s Day massacre.
If the U.S. Congress can borrow trillions to pay off the Koch Brothers, surely they can find the funding to make mental health professionals a norm in our public schools, as commonplace as a nurse and a thermometer.