EDITORIAL: Awareness, action can slow shootings

More than three years ago, staff at Freeman Public Schools spent a full day in training learning about, and how to respond to, an active shooter situation. Led by Chad Sheehan, a retired law enforcement officer from Sioux City who developed a program called S.A.V.E. Yourself, the training included both a lecture and a lab in which staff members were placed in a real-time scenarios, with various orders on how to respond.

“You don’t have to have a lot of special training for the things you can do to increase your chance of survival,” Sheehan told them. “Once you’re told, you realize it’s all these simple things — moving and distracting and maybe fighting back.”

In the months and years since that Aug. 16, 2018 training — which came six months after 17 were killed at Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. and three months after 10 were killed at Santa Fe High School — there have been dozens more school shootings. According to the news outlet Education Week, there have been 88 school shootings the past three years, 30 this year alone and 22 since Aug. 1.

While not all were active shooter situations, and while not all ended with casualties, those numbers represent a shocking trend of violence inside a space that, by design, is intended to be a safe one.

The latest, of course, comes in Oxford Township, Mich., where a 15-year-old sophomore shot and killed four students and injured six others and a teacher at Oxford High School. Ethan Crumbley has been charged as an adult with 24 crimes, including murder and terrorism. His parents, Jennifer and James, have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and were taken into custody after a manhunt led by the U.S. Marshals tracked them down inside of a warehouse in Detroit.

It was the deadliest school shooting since Santa Fe High School in Texas in May of 2018.

Not surprisingly, the Michigan shooting has quickly lit the fire of a gun debate that has been escalating in America since 1999’s Columbine shooting. Calls for stricter background checks and the limit of access to semiautomatic weapons have been quickly dismissed by Second Amendment advocates who claim the issue is not the legality of firearms, but rather the impure human condition.

Regardless of where one stands, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where somebody is OK with the Twitter post by United States Representative Thomas Massie showing him and his six other family members holding guns in front of a Christmas tree. It came four days after the deadly Michigan shooting and was captioned, “Merry Christmas! PS. Santa, please bring ammo.”

In what world is that OK?

Massie, who has represented the 4th District of Kentucky since 2012, has remained tone deaf on the matter, failing to recognize his insensitivity at best or take down the post (not that it would matter) at worst.

What is needed here is recognition that America has a problem with gun violence and helpful solutions. Massie’s tweet is neither; in fact, it only exacerbates a political divide that is among the worst in our country’s history and devastates those who have been victimized by senseless shootings, particularly in a school setting.

Do you know what is helpful?

Awareness.

And awareness can lead to a lot of things: Reasonable debates about gun laws in America that include worldwide data; an understanding of the context in which the Second Amendment was written; a more astute recognition and acknowledgement by both the health care industry and health insurance agencies of mental health challenges; and an awareness by schools far and wide that active school-shooter training is far more important that routine fire drills; and a proactive approach to dangerous language and warning signs.

“It’s a really tough subject to talk about,” said Kevin McCormick, a police officer in Sioux City who accompanied Sheehan to that training back in 2018. “It’s not fun to talk about Sandy Hook and kids getting killed; this is an ugly, ugly thing, but we have to realize that this is where we’re at in the world right now.”

That was 2018.

How far have we come?

Or how far have we digressed?

Until we all come together and recognize that we all share some responsibility in this calamity — and that includes Rep. Massie — this will continue to be “where we’re at in this world right now.” And who wants this?

Jeremy Waltner | Editor & Publisher