Hey, Guys, Take It Outside!

 

February Shootout in Georgia High School Parking lot

Hey, Guys, Take It Outside!

The Deadly Zone: School Parking Lots and Streets around Schools

"It's something that we have to live with every day, especially being students here, and yeah, I'd say it's pretty scary, to be honest." 

Seattle high school student, Jackson Hatch.

"You hope your kid can go to school and be safe and just focus on learning, but it does seem to be everywhere… It's in the schools. It's out of the schools. Crime is increasing. Gun violence is increasing and it's a scary thought." Alicia Hatch, Jackson’s mother.

Maybe you can “harden” campus buildings and have apps and transmitters that connect gun threats in school directly to the police. More cameras, more trained police officers, the ability to scramble a swat team nearby to move, move, move. But the game changes once the kids are out of the buildings. There could be guns in their vehicles. In gang-world, accomplices could be waiting. 84% of school-related shootings in the last five years have taken place outside of school buildings. Those killings tend to be more targeted and usually do not rise to the level of a “mass shooting,” although that happens too. But fights at outdoor athletic games, in the “school yard,” the school parking lot or a nearby street often elude the greater statistical analysis.

For years, based on severe NRA lobbying efforts, Congress passed the infamous “Dickey Amendment” – a rider to the1997 omnibus spending bill of the mandated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the [US] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control." And so, the government just did not keep records of those shootings, and instead, researchers had to rely on local reports for journalists to compile their numbers.

As Wikipedia tells it: “Although the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban it, for about two decades the CDC avoided all research on gun violence for fear it would be financially penalized. Congress clarified the law in 2018 to allow for such research, and the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996.” The CDC and the Surgeon General finally began collating some of the numbers – enough for the Surgeon General to report that firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens – but the overall picture has still not caught up to reality.

And we still are only shocked as a nation at mass school shootings, usually with an AR-15-style assault rifle. But one-offs kill a lot of teens. “A CBS News analysis of the K-12 School Shooting Database shows these ‘smaller’ shootings are more frequent than mass shootings… In each of the last three academic years, according to the analysis, there have been at least triple the number of school shootings compared to any single previous school year dating back to 1966… When violence does occur, CBS News found it's more often not inside the school but outside on school grounds such as parking lots, football fields and in front of buildings… A CBS News analysis of all school shootings nationwide revealed since 2018, 84% of deadly shootings happened outside school walls. The investigation also shows nearly 95% of deadly school shootings in the 2023-2024 school year happened outside on school campus.” CBS News, September 12th.

When you focus on campus shootings, the September 6th Washington Post tells us that since the Columbine shooting in 1999, there have been 417 school shootings; they counted about 383,000 students who have experienced gun violence at school. As the debacle at Uvalde illustrates in spades, “Researchers like David Riedman, who created the [CBS] K-12 School Shooting Database, said often, school administrators don't learn lessons from past school shootings. Riedman believes they adopt policies and technological solutions, which don't address the reality of what's happening.” CBS News.

Sure, there are lots of steps schools can take to “harden” their schools, but reality tells us that as long as powerful lobbying groups and the legislators they have bought embrace a gun culture where civilians are allowed to own rapid-fire, high-capacity military grade assault weapons, gun ownership will trump children’s lives. Indeed, if the US Supreme Court can reverse Roe v Wade, the 1973 abortion case supported by the vast majority of Americans, they sure as hell can reverse the first case American history, in more than two centuries, Heller vs DC, that egregiously ruled, with some of the most tortured logic I have ever read, that the 2nd Amendment (essentially passed in 1789 to allow citizen soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War to keep their guns) created an absolute right for Americans to own all sort of guns, from ordinary pistols to AR-15s.

Using the backdrop looking only at flintlocks and muskets, the Court twisted and squirmed to justify its holding in a ruling that many legal scholars have held is among the worst in that Court’s history. I have written about this case in many blogs, but as American military-grade firearms have empowered drug cartels south of the border, US ultra-violent gangs and mass shooters, the Court needs to accept that it has aided and abetted the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of victims. See, for example, my September 9th North America’s Most Violent Criminals’ Best Friend – US Gun Laws blog. As the majority of Americans favor realistic gun control, most even willing to ban those “mass shooter’s best friend” AR-15-style assault rifles, the Court needs to admit its error and undo Heller.

In the meantime, Congress needs to hold those who have supplied those weapons to mass shooters either knowingly or carelessly culpable in the resulting deaths. We’re beginning to see the beginnings of holding parents responsible for the negligent storage of guns resulting in mass shootings… or even gifting guns to their younger children. The feds would be equally justified in creating a federal statute imposing a mandatory life sentence (there is no parole in the federal system) for anyone convicted of a crime when using a semiautomatic assault weapon.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time to get serious about our values – assault weapons or our children – pick one; they are mutually exclusive choices.