Remember airplane hijackings? Twenty years ago they were commonplace. It started when one hijacker got what he wanted, then others learned from that success, and soon it seemed not a month went by without someone holding a gun to a pilot’s head. Hijackings made great news. They were widely copied.
Today it is hard to remember how popular they were because they happen so rarely.
What I do hear a lot about is murders in schools. I hear about them because they are newsworthy, because the media focuses our attention on them, because we are now going through a tragic spate of copycat occurrences. And I pay special attention because I have spent my career studying tendencies toward violence among young people, developing ways to identify kids at risk and devising ways to prevent violent behavior.
The latest school shooting happened just a few miles away from my office at the University of Oregon. In the small town of Springfield, Ore., a high school kid picked up a rifle and sprayed a roomful of students, killing two and injuring at least 19 others.
I have come to a tough conclusion.
If we want to stop the killing in our schools, we are going to have to make our children’s schools at least as safe as the airplanes we ride.
Hijackings did not end because we found potential hijackers and treated them for their problems. They did not end by keeping guns out of the hands of hijackers. They ended when we made it impossible to smuggle weapons onto airplanes.
If we want to make our schools safe again, we need to make it as difficult to bring a gun or a knife or a bomb into our schools as we have made it to bring them onto airplanes. If a child in school boasts that he is going to kill someone, we must treat it as seriously as we do if someone in an airport boasts that he is going to hijack a plane. We must limit the number of school entrances, install metal detectors and mount surveillance cameras. We must hire more security staff. We must allow personal searches.
We must do these things quickly if we are going to break the cycle of violence, if we are to stop the copycat killings.
While these measures are in place in many inner-city schools, they are considered anathema in other parts of the country. They will cost school districts and states tens of millions of dollars to implement. They will alter our sense of schools as havens of open and friendly community.
But they must be done. Only then, when we have broken the cycle and made our schools secure, can we devote ourselves to getting to the roots of this problem and achieving true prevention.
