The epidemic of school shootings in America could be drastically curtailed by a few simple policy changes.
First, school shooters should automatically receive the death penalty with only limited opportunities to appeal. The problem of frivolous appeals and court cases dragging on for decades afflicts our entire judicial system, but it is especially egregious in the case of school shootings.
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Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people last week at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
This isn’t the first time that parents are being held liable for their children’s actions. Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders.
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As a mother, I’m horrified by the notion that a child could be placed on a school bus and never come back home. Losing a child is a parent’s worst nightmare, and I’ve had too many friends who’ve walked through that darkness. As a member of a school board, I’m burdened that the decisions I make with my one vote of eleven could impact the safety of 64,000 children. I take those decisions very seriously, but I fear the root causes of this violence that are beyond my control.
The physical structures of schools are more secure than they have ever been. There are now school resource officers (SROs), stricter requirements on who can enter schools, and locked doors to keep the bad guys out. Students are encouraged to speak up: “If you see something, say something.” Yet I don’t believe anything school board members or administrators do can guarantee the safety of children without addressing the underlying cause of these senseless acts of violence—our country’s moral decay.
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