he says. “Some of the leaders of the suicide prevention movement are people who indeed lost their children to suicide. And in a few of those cases, how do you think they committed suicide? And then when you go to those people and say, ‘We’d like your support for a bill that does this,’ they say, ‘You’re gonna punish people who lost their child?’ ” The bill actually would give prosecutors discretion in filing charges against an adult, which would only be a misdemeanor. Pretty mild. But it would also require gun shops and gun show dealers to post signs and hand out flyers stating that the law holds adults responsible for keeping guns away from children. And those simple measures are anathema to the NRA and its more extreme offshoots.
The gun lobby’s power is occasionally exposed in surprising ways and places. After two tragic incidents in fall 2006—at an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and a Bailey, Colorado, high school—a coalition of educators, school psychologists, and health professionals came together and issued a statement on school violence. In both incidents, adult male intruders took students hostage and then shot and killed students and themselves. The coalition, called the National Consortium of School Violence Prevention Researchers and Practitioners, was concerned that the hysterical overreaction to the incidents would simply continue the harsh and ineffective approaches to school safety anointed in the wake of Columbine. The statement noted that schools are safer places for children than their homes or communities, where more violence occurs. In one brief paragraph, it takes direct aim at the role of guns:
Finally, it is also important to acknowledge that access to guns plays an important role in many acts of serious violence in the United States. Although guns are never the simple cause of a violent act, the availability of lethal weapons to youth and to emotionally disturbed or antisocial adults poses a serious public health problem that cannot be overlooked. Our political leaders need to find a reasonable and constitutional way to limit the widespread availability of guns to persons who are unwilling or unable to use them in a responsible, lawful manner.
Hardly a radical manifesto, the statement was endorsed by more than a hundred leading researchers and educators, as well as two dozen national professional organizations. Among them were the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Education Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the American Psychological Association. But one organization with a natural interest in school safety—the American Federation of Teachers—declined to sign the statement because it was afraid of controversy with the pro-gun lobby. “We lost the AFT over the last paragraph on guns,” says Matthew J. Mayer, a Rutgers University professor and a founder of the coalition. “Once you raise the issue of gun control you create a dynamic where some people feel there is no discussion. It’s like taking on the NRA lobbying machine.”
COLUMBINE: HIGH SCHOOL OR FORTRESS?
The Columbine attack unleashed a national frenzy of security equipment purchases, with metal detectors a popular choice. Closed campuses to restrict student movement, pumped-up school policing, and zero tolerance policies that criminalized a range of typical teen behaviors were also part of the equation. Educators were suddenly discussing bullying and programs to address its negative influence on the learning environment. Given that the Columbine tragedy was the impetus behind these changes, I was curious about how that infamous symbol of school violence had responded to concerns about security and a climate that fostered bullying of less popular students. Most people think the place must be a fortress with state-of-the-art antibullying programs and conflict resolution training. And they’d be wrong. Columbine High School has no metal detectors. Zero. There are a few more surveillance cameras, but there had been some in place before April 20, 1999. School resource officers? Still one SRO, same as before. Three new positions were added—campus supervisors, unarmed middle-aged men who walk around the campus. All but two entry doors are locked now, but the campus is not closed and students come and go freely during lunchtime and breaks.
On the Friday afternoon I visited Columbine High, school was over and clusters of students lingered outside the main entrance and inside the lobby. I walked through the unlocked front doors, which displayed a sign stating that the school was “protected by V-Soft,” a computer software program that scans visitor IDs to detect registered sex offenders. Another sign instructs all visitors to stop at the main office. There was no adult presence at the entrance, and no one questioned me as I walked in. The office was bustling with students, teachers, and staff preparing for the next day’s fifth annual Community Day, an event created to “give back to the community” that had rallied to help the school post–April 20, 1999. Over several e-mails and phone calls with his secretary, Principal DeAngelis had agreed to grant me a one-hour interview after school hours to discuss safety and security at Columbine, a large, two-story, multiwing campus with about 1,700 students. Businesslike but cordial, he ushered me into his office and talked about April 20 and school security as if he’d done it a hundred times before. He has. What did he do to create a sense of safety in the building after the tragedy? “I think we have surveillance camera systems second to none that we can access via our Blackberries,” he explains. “Campus supervisors can be anywhere in the building and can have access to what’s happening throughout the school. We have keyless entries. We have two entrances into the building that are open during the day. The one you just walked in and the one downstairs, and we have staff members monitoring them. All the other doors, when we’re locked down, are keyless entries. So if a key was to be lost—if this card was to be lost [holding a card on a lanyard around his neck]—it’s all tied into a computer system, so we can deactivate it. I’m the only that has twenty-four/seven access, along with our custodial person. Every period of the day we have adult supervision. So there are teachers during their planning periods that either monitor the doors downstairs or walk the halls upstairs.”
Jefferson County School District, of which Columbine is part, created threat-assessment teams that in each school began to identify students who posed potential risks. DeAngelis says he has used the process several times successfully, starting with his school social worker and moving up to the district level if action is warranted. Columbine devised an emergency response plan, and each semester it practices evacuations and lockdowns, he says, “and we talk to teachers about assignments, and are there red flags.” People always ask him why there are no metal detectors, DeAngelis says, and he poses his own question. “Would metal detectors have stopped Klebold and Harris? They would not. When they came on campus, we had a Jefferson [County] police officer who was armed. He exchanged gunfire. They drove into the parking lot. They’re not gonna stop at the metal detector and go through. They came in blasting,” he says. “A lot of times metal detectors are false security, and the presence of that security system, or the metal detector—is it really gonna stop another school shooting? Not necessarily. And then you look at the practicality of it. A month after the shooting at Columbine, President Clinton came to Dakota Ridge High School to address us, and all because of security reasons, all the people had to go through metal detectors. And it was an hour. Do we do that every day with students and make them go through metal detectors? It’s still a place to educate students, and do students, and do parents, want a fortress?”
The Columbine community considered that question, and so did the Columbine Review Commission. It rejected the high-tech fortress approach to making Colorado schools safer, noting the limitations of metal detectors and other hardware: “Although security devices can effectively deter certain forms of school crimes, including theft, graffiti and gang violence, they have not yet proven to be cost effective in preventing major school violence like that experienced by Columbine High School. Therefore, the Commission does not recommend the universal installation of metal detectors, video surveillance cameras and other security equipment as a means of forestalling violence generally; for the present, such devices can serve only to offer transient solutions to specific problems at individual schools.”13
The commission also offered prescriptions for addressing conditions in a school that could foster a Columbine-type incident. One called for changing what it termed the “code of silence” in student culture to encourage reporting potential threats from classmates. Another recommendation homed in on bullying, which the commission stated was either a huge problem
