SAFE School Act is Phony Baloney

 

by Pa Rock

Former Principal

This past March there was a school shooting in Tennessee which shocked a lot of people.  The shocking part wasn't bullets flying in a school and tearing though the innocent bodies of young children, that happens all of the time in America.  The shocking thing was where it happened.   This barbarism did not occur at some under-funded, inner-city, gulag of desperation where minority children are collected and stuffed into overcrowded classrooms and then forgotten.    The shooting last March happened in Nashville, not only the capital of Tennessee, but the capital of US country music as well, and it did not happen in an underfunded public school, but rather in a nice, private school run by a church, where people with means sent their children.

Six people were killed at the Covenant School in Nashville that awful day, three nine-year-olds and three adults in their sixties.  One of the youngsters who died was the child of the pastor who was the school's leader, and one of the adults was a substitute teacher who was a good friend of Tennessee's governor and his family.

The Covenant school shooting in Nashville was different and it impacted a group of people who had no experience at being personally impacted.  It made people mad and it began to elicit responses from a wide variety of individuals who in the past would not have responded.

The state of Tennessee, which is by-and-large under the control of the Republican Party, had to be careful in its response.  Politicians there needed to be righteously angry without doing anything that might interfere with the gun industry's ability to continue to make and sell weapons-of-war (like the AR-15) with total impunity.  Yes, we love our kids and want to protect our kids, but trying to stop the spread of guns is not the answer.

So Tennessee politicians, with the exception of a few "radicals" in the state legislature, signed onto the old NRA argument that the best way to protect people from gun violence is through having more guns ready to join in the fray.

A couple of weeks ago Tennessee's two US Senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Haggerty, grabbed some important space in the press when they introduced legislation in Congress which they call the SAFE School Act, an act which they say will:

Provide a $900 million grant program to schools (public and private, of course) to train and hire veterans and former law enforcement officers to serve as school safety officers, hire off-duty law enforcement officers, and provide funding to harden schools and increase physical security.

Or, in the King's English, the bill would put more adults with guns inside of school buildings and provide more secure doors and windows.  Problem solved!

Then, to frost that cake, Senator Blackburn told a Fox News "journalist" yesterday that she would also support putting armed "grandparents" in the schools to help with the protection of students.  Most public schools in America are already crowded to the rafters with human bodies thanks to years of defunding by state governments, so it is unclear to this former teacher and school administrator where all of the extra people would sit, stand, or shuffle about.  And where would all of those guns be kept when Ma and Pa Kettle weren't on patrol?  Would that $900 million also be used for locked gun cabinets?

Here are my two over-arching thoughts on the SAFE School Act:

1.  More guns do not make a situation safer, and there is no credible research anywhere that reaches the opposite conclusion; and,

2.  Even if this plan made sense, which it does not, $900 million is just one more example of abysmal GOP underfunding.  In 2019-2020 there were 132,853 schools for students for grades K-12 in the United States (98,277 public and 34,576 private).  If those grant funds were evenly distributed among those 132,853 schools, each would receive a whopping $677.44, an amount that would probably not purchase one good security door.

Yes, there are ways that more money could make schools safer, and  strengthening doors and windows and employing better security measures - like restricting points of entry into schools and having plans to keep classroom doors and windows locked would help, but packing the hallways with Rambo wannabes and tottering old folks - all armed - would be extremely dangerous and would quickly result in reports of deadly unintended consequences.

School shootings will be reduced only when easy access to guns and weapons-of-war is reduced.  Fewer high-powered guns in society will equal fewer dead children in schools.  It's math, and it's simple.  Things like the SAFE Schools Act are just smoke and mirrors.  They are designed to give the illusion that something is being done, when, in reality, it's just the same old business as usual.  Gun business.