Keeping Schools Safe

By David Shaw

We all want our children to be safe, whether at Newtown primary, École Polytechnique or Dawson College, and there are several easy things mentioned below, including a ban on semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, that we can do as a society to safeguard them. Yet we should know that no matter what we do, there is never an absolute guarantee of safety in anything in life. Shit happens.

The one thing we do not want to do is to get swept up by the psychosis of our neighbour: the United States. There are reasonable individuals in the USA, yet the country as a whole is psychopathic and, it seems, gun incidents are escalating. Where else in the world would people seriously propose in national media that children died because:

• Schools are a gun-free zone
• Children were not taught how to charge a killer en masse
• Teachers were not armed like these 600
• Children did not wear accesories like bullet-proof back-packs
• God was denied access to schools
• Guns are restricted too much
• Crazy people are not identified and locked up
• Armed guards are not in every school
• Children's hearing is damaged because silencers are restricted
• Good guys couldn't fight back because they didn't all have guns

We also do not want to get swept up by the security and surveillance set that proposes to turn schools into the modern equivalence of a motte-and-bailey castle; or by distractions like bans on assault-style weapons (stay with me on this one). A security approach would turn every school into a fortress:

• Perimeter fence with a controlled gateway
• Parking outside the fence
• Main entrance is a controlled airlock
• Silent panic alarm system to notify police
• Raised windows fitted with plate glass
• All auxiliary doors automatically locked, fitted with emergency bars on the inside, fitted with alarms and cameras activated when doors open
• Classroom doors automatically locking, with no large windows, so every room becomes a secure panic room
• Cameras in all corridors

Some of these measures are sensible, like a panic alarm, secure design of classrooms and control over side doors. What we want to do is slow down any intruder, alert police immediately without panicked people shouting "what's the number for 911" and keep people in a secure location until the police arrive. (The formula for protection against intruders is Deter, Discover, Delay, Deny.) But a look at any large high-school campus like this one shows how impossible some of these ideas are. Large schools are like villages. And anyway, armed camps send the wrong cultural message to children and to our larger society.

Typical large high-school -- note the sports fields

Bans on assault-type weapons are a deliberate political distraction aimed to protect the bulk of the self-loading gun market. Assault-type weapons are semi-automatic (self-loading) rifles that just happen to have military styling. In the United States new semi-automatic rifles with a military-style appearance were prohibited from retail sale by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which was enacted in 1994 and expired in 2004. But what's the point of banning the "appearance" but allowing the function? There are dozens of semi-automatic types and models, including some that look just like traditional hunting rifles. Semi-automatic simply means that every time you pull the trigger, another round is loaded. Some gun types have been semi-automatic since 1885.

Instead of worrying about "appearance" and fortress schools we should focus on creating a safe society for everyone with measures such as:

• Ban on all semi-automatic rifles, semi-automatic shotguns, and silencers
• Licencing of all gun owners, just like car drivers, and a national licence-registration database
• Training as a prerequisite for a gun licence
• Periodic licence renewal just like a driver's licence
• Police approval for gun purchases
• Restrictions on the amount and type of ammunition that can be purchased
• Mandatory public-liability insurance for gun owners

If Conservative radicals oppose a ban on semi-automatic rifles (as they will), then we should have:

• Magazines limited to 10 rounds
• Ban on stackable nagazines

I personally think 10 rounds is too many -- a bolt-action rifle is adequate for hunting --  but it's a number political radicals might force us to accept.