My prayers and heart go out to the families and friends of the victims of the latest mass shootings. I have been struggling with an appropriate constructive response to this tragedy. Nothing we do can bring back all the lives that have been lost in all the mass shootings. Now the youth are leading the way in the fight to prevent such tragedies in the future, this is a hopeful and wonderful response as it is their future. It is always with the youth that our hope for the future finds it best expression. As I get older I see my role shifting to enabling the next generation. One way this can happen is to provide encouragement. To the youth I say, thank you, stay the course, keep heart, and remain dedicated to the task, especially when it seems your task seems hopeless, it isn’t. Another way of helping is to provide our best thoughts and insight for their consideration, an effort to pass down the best we have to offer, not as a mandate, not as an agenda or assignment, but as something for them to ponder. It should be our hope that they will take where we start and move beyond it, creating something better than we could create. This post is my best current thought on the matter.
People are searching for a single legislative solution to the problem. Legislation is clearly needed. However, it seems unlikely to me that any single change will result in the elimination of mass shootings in the United States. Rather I believe that there needs to be a collection of changes and legislation to at least minimize the possibility of mass shootings. These changes need to include: prevention, planning, preparation, training, practice, execution, evaluation, and modification.
Prevention: Every mass shooting event that is prevented is one less event to which we need to respond. Prevention means: maximizing the chance that someone who wants to commit an act of indiscriminate violence is identified and confronted, once identified making sure they are denied access to the guns or other items necessary to carry out the plan, and making sure they get the support necessary to resolve the issues. Prevention means dealing with the issues in the schools and society at large that trigger the desire to commit an act of indiscriminate violence. But prevention alone is unlikely to be 100% effective. We still have car accidents, murders, and act of violence. People will get angry, guns are likely to remain available in spite of any regulations, background checks etc. Prevention needs to include training those who come into contact with the at risk individual to identify individuals likely to consider acts of violence. Prevention will include procedures for collection of data, the dissemination of data, and the ability to act on the data. Prevention will include preventing at risk individuals from getting access to items they need to carry out their plans. Part of this should involve deciding what items the public can purchase and what items they cannot. Everything should be on the table.
Planning: Prevention is unlikely to be 100% effective. We plan for fires with fire departments, medical emergencies with ambulances and hospitals, and snow with snowplows. Similarly we need to plan, in advance, for our response when someone with intent to kill indiscriminately gets access to the tools to carry out their desires.
Preparation: No amount of planning will be effective unless we prepare for the execution of the plan. For just one example, if teachers are to sequester the students in a classroom, then their needs to be an effective way of locking the door from the inside quickly, in such a way that the shooter cannot enter but the police can. The door needs to be strong enough that bullets cannot enter the classroom ….
Training: Those involved in the response need to be trained in their expected roles and actions. No amount of planning and preparation will be effective if those involved do not know what is expected of them and know the procedures necessary to carry out the expectations. These responses need to be automatic which leads us to:
Practice: In an emergency situation we often run on instinct. That instinct can be effective or ineffective. Practice can make the response automatic so that the right thing is done during the confusion of the actual event. Without practice and preparation the response may become ineffective. Practice also involves some sort of the simulation of the event.
Execution: When the time comes, the plan needs to be successfully implemented.
Evaluation: After the incident the response needs to be evaluated. Even if the execution of the plan was successful an evaluation still needs to be performed. There are some of the questions that need to be asked: What worked, what didn’t work, were there barriers to execution, was the preparation adequate, what changes would make the response more effective, what could have been done to prevent the incident in the first place. These questions allow for the accumulation of best practices, issues that need addressing, and modifications that might make the entire sequence more effective.
Modification: Evaluations will not lead to improvement unless the evaluations leads to modifications of the system. When it becomes apparent that modifications would be effective, they need to be implemented. After implementation the entire process needs to be gone through again.
As I listen to people talk about the problem of gun violence in schools it seems most speakers put the emphasis on one or two of these items. I have come to the conclusion that dealing effectively with the problem will involve addressing each of these areas. We do this in other areas where failure involves catastrophic consequences. We need to take shootings in school with the same seriousness, or even more seriousness, than other potentially catastrophic events; at the national, state, and regional levels. Taking it seriously involves; study, legislation, funding, and the desire and will of all those who can have an impact on the schools.
Again my prayers and heart go out to all those who grieve, My encouragement goes out to the young people who are working so hard to make a difference. Perhaps the biggest thing each of us can do is to vote out of office all those who do not take this problems seriously enough to look for and implement solutions that are effective on multiple levels.
2/22/2018
Edited for grammar and clarity 2/24/2018