Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith called the recent shooting at Winder’s Apalachee High School “pure evil.” It was horrifying and tragic, but it was not pure evil. In fact, we do ourselves and the victims a disservice if we think about this tragic event that way.
For thousands of years, people have said that the cause of violence was evil. There is nothing we can do about evil, they say, because it has existed from time immemorial, for as long as there have been people. And evil will continue to exist, we can’t get rid of it. So why even try? Just pray and comfort the victims. This fatalism — the idea that we can’t make things better but just have to accept them the way they are — is a serious threat to our safety.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
School shootings are a problem. They are a problem that we can tackle and solve. We can protect our kids going forward by learning from the past. We can figure out how to prevent more shootings if we just answer four simple questions.
First, what is the problem? Who was shot? Where? When? What kind of security was there? What was the relationship between the shooter and the victims? What kind of weapon was used? How and where was the weapon obtained? What are the trends we can see in these kinds of shootings? Are they increasing or decreasing?
Second, what were the causes? What was the role of drugs or alcohol? What was the role of robbery? Bullying? What was the role of easy access to weapons? What was the role of gangs? Mental illness? Family violence or other stresses at home? What else has changed over time that corresponds to the trends in shootings?
Third, what works to prevent this type of shooting? What has worked in other countries or cities? Could better mental health care make a difference? Better treatment for substance abuse? Better monitoring of social media? Safer storage of firearms? Would arming teachers save lives, or would it result in more kids being shot? Would restricting access to firearms by unsupervised minors work? Would metal detectors in all schools reduce shootings? More long-term investments in community building and addressing the hopelessness that results from poverty, lack of job opportunities, access to quality education and discrimination? The only way we can know if a particular intervention would work is to test it and evaluate it.
Fourth, how do you do it? Once you find an intervention that works, how do you get it into policy and scale it up from one school to every community?
Just as we will not find that there is a single cause of these shootings, we will not find a single solution to prevent all shootings. It will take finding the right combination to get us to safety.
Increasing the capacity of our woefully inadequate mental health system to screen and provide care to all of those who need it will likely be just one part of the solution. It could be particularly important for preventing gun suicides, which constitute the majority of firearm deaths in Georgia. But experts tell us that even if we could magically cure all the major mental illness in this country, it would reduce violence by only 4%. And to fix our mental health system in Georgia, to provide adequate care for everyone in the state would cost billions of dollars and take a very long time. Especially if we want this system to help people who do not have a major mental illness but are frustrated, angry, alienated. So, improving mental health care in Georgia is very important, but it’s not enough to stop all the school shootings or gun violence in our state.
We can do much better in keeping firearms out of the hands of those who cannot legally possess them, whether they be minors or people who have been convicted of felonies or misdemeanor domestic violence. We will need to do this without infringing on the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Policies that can do this include requiring safe storage when there are minors in the home, universal background checks, forbidding firearm ownership by people convicted of domestic violence, and detecting and preventing firearms from being brought into schools.
There are also many interventions that seem promising but need more evaluation. One is extreme-risk protection orders or red-flag laws that enable law enforcement or judicial officers to temporarily remove access to firearms by people who are determined to be at very high risk of shooting themselves or another person. If Georgia can develop a red-flag law, it would give concerned parents, school personnel and law enforcement officers a mechanism to use when they fear a child or loved one is about to kill themselves or another. Research will help assess the effectiveness and also help to design and test more ways to both save more lives and protect gun rights.
We all want to save our kids and make our schools safe. We all want this whether we are for gun rights or gun reform. We all want this whether we vote Republican or Democratic, whether we live in blue or red states. Some of the people who call these acts pure evil might be trying to divert attention from focusing on firearms as a cause of school shootings. They fear that any discussion of firearm safety will result in policies that infringe on their right to own and use their guns. Gun rights and gun safety are not mutually exclusive goals. We can find policies and programs that will save lives without infringing on the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
We are so polarized as a country that we forget that we are fighting for the lives of our children. By diverting our attention from the problem and its possible solutions, we are just condemning ourselves to live with this fear and more deaths, things that none of us really want.
Gov. Brian Kemp said that it is not the time to discuss recommendations for policy changes. He is correct that we don’t yet fully understand everything we need to learn about the shooting in Winder. We will continue to ask the right questions and learn important lessons from this tragedy and from many other sources. Kemp and our legislators have an opportunity to appoint a bipartisan, multidisciplinary panel to study the problem, the causes, what works and how we can get it done. He has a chance to save more kids and teachers from needlessly dying, to tackle this problem with a balanced set of recommendations that we can all support.
Julie Rosenberg is associate director of the Better Evidence program at Ariadne Labs and deputy director of the Global Health Delivery program at the Harvard-Chan School of Public Health. Mark Rosenberg was assistant U.S. Surgeon General and the founding director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. He is president emeritus of the Task Force for Global Health.
