Can You Trust Your School With Your Child's Safety?

Can You Trust Your School With Your Child’s Safety?


There are certain moments that live in our memories forever. I vividly remember JFK’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s murder, the Challenger explosion, Princess Diana’s death, and the events unfolding on 9/11. I will also remember my stunned reaction at hearing that yet another school shooting had taken at least 33 lives at Virginia Tech. Suddenly, recent events shifted into proper perspective. Imus, the Duke Lacrosse team, Anna Nicole’s baby, and Brittany Spears’ shaved head no longer seemed important. Somewhere parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends are grieving for people that they loved. Somewhere a mother just like me knows that she will never hear her child’s voice again on this earth. I cannot imagine the pain. Somewhere other parents are standing by the bedsides of their wounded children and hoping that they will survive the night.

Since October 1997 when a sixteen-year-old Mississippi boy stabbed his mother before shooting dead two students at his school, eighty-eight students, teachers, and administrators have been killed in school shootings across the United States. Usually, students have been the shooters, but occasionally, as in the Amish school shootings, an adult is the killer. The Virginia Tech shootings are the nineteenth in the string of shootings, and they are the bloodiest. These murders constitute the largest mass killing in the history of our country.

The violence is escalating and the frequency of the attacks is increasing. What is happening in our schools? Don’t talk to me of how the shooter is a victim. I don’t want to hear about his socio-economic background. I don’t want to hear that he was picked on by other students. I don’t want to read anything that blames the thirty-two dead students for their own murders. Don’t tell me that more gun laws would solve the problem. The Columbine shooters violated nineteen gun laws when they took their weapons into that school.

In fact, two years ago Virginia Tech led the charge to make certain that licensed, trained gun owners (faculty or students) could not bring guns onto their campus. If just one of those trained gun owners had had a gun, maybe Holocaust survivor Livin Librescu, a 76 year old Jewish professor, would not have had to sacrifice his own life to save his students. When Librescu heard gunshots, he closed his classroom door and braced himself against it, allowing all of his students to escape through the windows.

The gun ban at Virginia Tech didn’t stop South Korean Cho Seung-Hui from having a gun there. According to his creative writing professor, Cho was “troubled,” wrote papers that disturbed her, and was referred to counseling. He had recently set a fire in a dorm room and stalked several women.

Cho had “Ishmael Acts” written on his arm. I’m not sure what was meant by that cryptic message, but I do know that Ishmael was the illegitimate son of Abraham. He was the father of the Arabs (Muslims). Al Qaida said that the schools would be the next targets. The rampage may have been set off, as the official story goes, by a romance that ended badly. However, why did Cho not stop after he had killed the girl in her dorm? Why did he walk more than a mile across the campus and shoot into classrooms? Maybe we should be concerned about people immigrating here other than Hispanics. After all, they just want jobs; others coming across our borders want to kill us.