by Frances Floresca
We often hear “let’s ban guns” or “we need more guns” as solutions when it comes to school safety and mass violence in schools.
Everyone is frustrated and angry after the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. This should not be about playing politics, but we should be finding solutions to protect students without bringing guns into the conversation. Just several days before the shooting, a poll released by Gallup found that 44% of parents fear for their child’s safety.
While hopefully none of us will ever be in a mass shooting, it is wise to be prepared. I recall my alma mater, the University of Utah, having two separate shooting incidents back in 2017 and 2018, leading to lockdowns on campus. While I was not on campus during the 2017 shooting, which led to the death of one student, in 2018, I was just getting off campus when we received a notification about going into lockdown due to another shooting that led to the death of another student. I was frightened, and I even wondered if the shooter would show up right in my face.
Earlier that year, I attended a school safety seminar just after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla. The seminar was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C. non-profit that “formulates and promotes conservative public policies” and is “the most broadly supported public policy research institute in the country,” according to the U.S. Department of state. We discussed solutions related to school violence. It was then, I realized, not much has been done to make our schools safer. It is now 2024, and much still has not been done to protect our students, educators, and school staff.
At the seminar, we talked about mental health, protecting school buildings, and the role of families and culture. Many states have passed school safety measures over the years, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signing legislation just this year spending hundreds of millions for school security.
Whether that is improving locks, getting more cameras or hiring a school resource officer, all schools have their own unique challenges to protect those in their school buildings.
We also discussed other solutions such as more community involvement and supporting families better. The Winder shooter, Colt Gray, reportedly came from a broken home life, and unfortunately, many shooters come from these homes.
While every school is different when it comes to finding solutions, if there is something I have learned, criminals do not care about the law and will unfortunately still find ways to get weapons no matter what. Interventions need to happen before these incidents take place.
Even more precautions could have been taken when it came to Apalachee High School.
Gray was on the FBI’s radar, and not much was done about it besides him being questioned about a shooting threat he made back in 2023. The FBI should have kept a closer eye on him, informing the schools he attended about him, then those schools could have even helped him get to mental health resources and give better support for his family. The Heritage Foundation suggests that “churches and support groups play a critical role in building and maintaining safe and thriving communities.”
All threats should also be taken more seriously. Apalachee High School and four other schools received threats just before Gray opened fire. In other places, schools go into immediate lockdown once a threat is made.
While the school went into lockdown reportedly before shots were even heard, these lockdowns need to happen much more quickly and more effectively. Gratefully school resource officers responded quickly, preventing more tragedy from happening, but it did not need to cost the lives of two students and two teachers, as well as injuring 30 others.
We need to take school safety more seriously in the CSRA and in Georgia without making it be all about guns, and we need to work together to find solutions that will truly benefit our children’s educational institutions.
Frances Floresca is an education policy analyst and reporter, who resides in Grovetown, Georgia. Her work has been featured in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Signal, and Real Clear Education. She has also appeared on Fox News Radio, One America News Network, WJBF, and WRDW. Frances has worked in public policy and media in Utah, Washington, D.C., Nevada, and Georgia.
