After Parkland, there have been many calls to make schools a
"harder target" — for example, by arming teachers. But there's a
decent amount of research out there on what actually makes schools safer, and
most of it doesn't point to more guns.
On
the Friday after the deadly shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School in Florida, Matthew Mayer, a professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of
Education, got an email during a faculty meeting.
The
email was from Shane Jimerson, a professor at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Both specialize in the study of school violence.
That
email led to nearly two weeks of long days, Mayer says, for some of the leading
experts in the field. On conference calls and in Google docs they shaped a
concise, eight-point "Call for Action To Prevent Gun Violence
In The United States of America."
About
200 universities, national education and mental health groups, school
districts, and more than 2,300 individual experts have signed on to support
this document in the weeks since.
Their
topline message: Don't harden schools. Make them softer, by improving social
and emotional health.
"If
we're really talking about prevention, my perspective is that we should go for
the public health approach," says Ron Avi Astor at the University of
Southern California, who also helped draft the plan.
A
public health approach to disease means, instead of waiting for people to be
rushed to emergency rooms with heart attacks or the flu, you go into the
community: with vaccinations, screenings, fruits and vegetables, walking trails
and exercise coaches. You screen and regulate environmental hazards, like a
nearby polluting factory. You keep watch on reported cases of illness, to stop
a new outbreak in its tracks.
A public health approach to school shootings,
Astor explains, would be much along the same lines.
Instead
of waiting for people to, again, be rushed into emergency rooms, you go into
the community with preventive resources. You do your best to lower the
background levels of bullying and discrimination. You track the data and
perform what is called "threat assessments" on potential risks.
And,
these experts say, you remove the major "environmental hazard" that
contributes to gun violence: the guns. The eight-point plan calls for universal
background checks, a ban on assault-style weapons, and something called Gun
Violence Protection Orders: a type of emergency order that would allow police
to seize a gun when there is an imminent threat.
What
sets this call to action apart from other policy proposals is not gun control,
however, but the research-based approach to violence prevention and response.
This is a long haul, say the experts, not a quick fix.
"No
matter what you try to do by just hardening the target, we've learned that
having the armed officers isn't necessarily going to stop it," says
Matthew Mayer at Rutgers. "Having the metal detector or the locked doors
isn't going to stop it. The hard work is a lot more effort. You'd better start
thinking in a more comprehensive manner about prevention instead of reacting."
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