If you Google “gun at school”, you don’t get results about Uvalde, Parkland or Newtown – you get a multitude of recent news articles posted 2 days ago, 1 day ago, 3 hours ago, 28 minutes ago.

Headlines like “Student arrested after gun found on campus at high school in Phoenix” “Bowie High School student brings loaded glock handgun on school property” “Student charged after loaded gun found at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School” “Mother of 6-year-old who shot teacher faces sentencing” “Student armed with a gun at high school football game” – all of these and pages more – all across the country from Washington to South Carolina. They had guns in backpacks, in their pocket, hidden in the bathroom.

When you start scanning these articles it feels like an epidemic. I mean one gun at one school is too much.

According to a recent Washington Post article, 1 in 47 school-aged kids go to school where at least one gun was discovered and reported to the media during the 2022-23 school year.

This is Speaking of Teens, the podcast that helps parents who are struggling to find peace and connection with their teens. My name is Ann Coleman; I’m an attorney turned parent educator and a mom who has been there - and I’m on a mission to help you build a stronger relationship and decrease the conflict with your kid so you can help them grow into the young adult they’re meant to be.

I’m not trying to be alarmist here, but this IS alarming, isn’t it? Last school year alone, more than 1,150 guns were brought to schools (K-12) – that’s an average of 6 guns a day making it to school…and remember, those are just the ones that were discovered and made it into the news.

And according to the Post, in a survey it conducted of 51 of the largest school systems in the US, almost 60% of the guns discovered last year never made it into the news – almost 60%!

For one thing, many schools want to keep this quiet. And there are tons of rural and urban areas that aren’t generally covered in the local news – some areas are so riddled with violence that a gun at school that did no harm doesn’t even register.

Those large school districts say the “guns on campus” problem has dramatically increased in the past few years.

Some of the incidents have included an apparent mass shooting plan at an Ohio high school that was thwarted because a student found a single bullet in the rest room and told an adult.

One 20-something in New Mexico was able to walk the halls of his former high school campus, dressed as a sheriff’s deputy with a gun holstered on his hip! A high schooler in Florida thought it’d be cool to take selfies with a gun in the school bathroom and a 10-year-old took her correctional officer mother’s gun to school. During the 2022-23 school year there were at least 31 kids caught with gun on campus who were 10 or younger.

These types of situations and the number of guns we see in schools shouldn’t really even surprise us anymore.

Let me tell you about the findings from a major study on US Youth Attitudes on Guns that was just released in July of this year.

The study was conducted jointly by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Everytown USA and the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab of American University. They questioned over 4,100 people aged 14 to 30.

The study found that:

• 74% of these young people agree that gun violence is a problem.
• 42% said they have at least somewhat easy access to guns (27% just looking at the under 18 crowd said this)
• Approximately 25% of young people have experienced an active shooter lockdown.
• They know, on average, at least one person who has been injured or killed by a gun.
• School safety is a major concern for them, and worry about school shootings is associated with a host of negative mental health outcomes.

No matter what your stance on gun control, it’s sad that over a quarter of kids under 18 say they have “somewhat easy access to a gun.”

The fact that anxiety and depression among adolescents has skyrocketed should be enough that adults make it impossible for their kids to get their hands on guns for any reason. When you think about what AnnMoss Rogers said in episode 79 about how quickly someone can make the decision to take their life and how soon that feeling can pass – it should terrify us all to have a gun of any kind anywhere near our teens.

My husband and son have hunting rifles and guns for range and skeet shooting. But when our son was going through his period of anxiety and depression, my husband kept them stored at someone else’s house locked in safe. So, if not for the safety of another kid, we should have the forethought to think about our own.

Since the pandemic, the number of gun seizures have increased by almost 80% in 47 school districts that the Post was able to collect complete data on.

In many areas their numbers doubled.

Experts say kids who are most likely to bring guns to school are most likely the ones who not only have easier access to them at home but who’ve been victimized in some way, have no sense of connection to their school or community. Many of them have brought guns to protect themselves – whether real or imagined they don’t feel safe going to and from school.

The grassroots, non-partisan organization, Moms Demand Action say that up to 80% of school shooters under the age of 18, obtain their gun at home.

But there’s also evidence that kids are buying guns on the street – stolen guns are a huge market in the US and they are showing up more and more at schools.

 

Imagine finding out days after the fact that someone at your kid’s middle school had brought a gun to school. What about getting a message from the school that a couple of teens had been arrested at your older kid’s high school. Or learning that a loaded gun came to the elementary school in a 4-year-old’s backpack – it happens.

But a lot of times you don’t end up even learning the whole truth of the matter. There are schools that don’t want you to know the truth of the situation. For example, in the Post article, it mentions one situation in Alabama where an automated phone message had gone out to parents to let them know that a gun had been brought to school, the student had been apprehended and that no one had been in direct danger. But that was not true as one set of parents knew very well because their 8^th grade son had already told them that the kid had brought a semiautomatic pistol to school and as he’d been showing it off in the field house, he’s actually pointed it in the kids faces. Actually, what their son said the minute he got in the car after school was, “momma, I could have died today.” That gives me full body chills.

We’ve been living with the reality of increasing gun violence for years in this country and guns at school and school shootings have simply been a fact of life for more than 20 years.

For school shootings, the worse year on record was the 2021-2022 school year. Just as the number of guns on campus rose after the pandemic – so did the actual incidents of gunfire at schools. And that school year saw almost 4 times the number of incidents in 2013. As a matter of fact, every school year since 2013 saw an average of 49 school shooting incidents in the US – but last year 21-22 there were 193 on school grounds from preschool through grade 12.

Schools are trying different things. They may add more resource officers, more counselors, security systems, cameras, emergency alarms, anonymous tip lines and app.

Kids go through lockdown drills and walk through metal detectors – many know nothing different, but they have to feel like school is more of a prison than somewhere that nurtures learning. It’s just so unfair.

Many schools are trying to build a school culture that encourages kids to report any sort of security threat, which according to some security experts is the best way to find out that someone’s planning something or has a weapon. But even that has caused issues for both the kids who report and the kids reported on.

And any security system, is only as good as the policies and procedures for adherence. There are so many stories about kids getting in the school through an unlocked back door, hiding a gun outside to retrieve later or getting a friend to open the door to let them in.

So, safety and security for our kids at school can’t just be about 1 thing – 1 measure. It takes school personnel, the students, the families, the police, and the community, all working together in a coordinated effort.

As Everytown USA points out, we need a multifaceted approach to keep schools safe. Schools need tools to prevent school-based violence. They’ve produced a report that includes approaches that have been shown to work, including (quote) “such as keeping guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them in the first place, fostering safe and trusting school environments, crisis intervention programs, access and lock upgrades, and trauma-informed emergency planning.”

Everytown also points out that we can’t get sidetracked with risky ideas like arming teachers and hoping they can spring into superhero mode during a fight or flight moment that some trained law enforcement officers even have trouble with. And that we might want to have security officers at school but we have to make sure they have limited involvement and are very specially trained because of the role they’re known to play in the school to prison pipeline issue for students of color.

Their report also includes recommendations regarding laws – like enact and enforce secure firearm storage laws. Require background checks on all gun sales. Raise the Age to Purchase Semi-automatic Firearms and pass extreme risk laws.

Extreme risk laws – this is a type of law that people have had high hopes for (at least in the 20 states where they’ve been passed) – otherwise known as a red flag law.

Of course, this law doesn’t just work to help protect kids in schools but to protect everyone. And certainly, in a country who kills more people with guns in the first 2 months of a year than all other high-income countries do in an entire year, we need stricter laws.

But even with stricter laws we’re counting on flawed humans all along the chain to use common sense and impeccable judgment to insure the laws do what they’re intended to – to protect us.

For example, the mass shooting that happened in Maine just weeks ago, killing 18 people. Major mistakes were made. There was a period of almost 6 months where police could have stepped in but didn’t for some unknown reason.

I listened to The Daily, the New York Times podcast on November 2^nd about this case. And it’s clear that the police made a terrible judgment call based on Maine’s yellow flag law (which you may have guessed is not quite as full-coverage as a red-flag law.)

Let me explain. Red flag laws (again, also known as extreme risk laws) are specifically intended for situations when a family member or law enforcement feels like someone, who may be having a mental health crisis, is at extreme risk of harming themselves or someone else. In this case the family member or police can petition a court and ask for a temporary order to separate the person from their guns. The judge can do this based solely on testimony from the person who makes the petition – no 3^rd parties necessary.

But Maine didn’t pass a full-blown red flag law – they passed what has been dubbed a “yellow flag law” (which is still better than the states who have nothing) – so, Maine’s law is watered down because the state’s gun rights group. They pressured the state legislature to make damn sure that the gun owner’s rights weren’t trampled – that they got their due process.

But wait – red flag laws do not trample on anyone’s due process rights - they meet the Supreme Court’s standards and have been upheld under scrutiny – for example in a Florida appellate court.

So, just for good measure and to make sure no homicidal or suicidal gun owner ever loses temporary access to their guns to protect themselves or the public – Maine’s law adds that a medical practitioner must first examine the gun owner and put it writing to the police that the person is found to present a likelihood of foreseeable harm. Then the police have to request an order from a judge to hold onto their guns for them.

Now, this order is just good for 2 weeks when the restricted person then has a right to a full-blown hearing. During those 14 days they can’t possess, control, acquire or attempt to possess, control, or acquire any sort of dangerous weapon.

But here’s what happened with Robert Card who ended up killing those 18 people in Maine in the 6 months or so leading up to the shooting:

In May his son and ex-wife reported to his son’s school resource officer and then to a deputy in the sheriff’s office that Card was hearing voices and was becoming more and more angry and paranoid and because he owned 10 to 15 guns they were afraid he was going to do something awful.

The deputy contacts the Army Reserves where he was employed for the past 20 years and they were already aware of some very troublesome behavior. So, the deputy decided to leave it with the Army Reserves at that point.

There was then this very paranoid delusional episode he had with his Army Reserve buddies during a training exercise that freaked everyone out and involved a supervisor who decided the guy needs medical help, takes him to a hospital who then puts him in a psychiatric hospital, where he stays for 2 weeks.

Upon getting out, he tried to buy a silencer for a gun – but at that point he did answer on the form truthfully that he’d been in a mental health facility and so they didn’t sell it to him.

After that, things just got worse and worse. His paranoia intensified, he starts talking about doing a mass shooting like at the Army Reserve base and other specific places – even punched a friend who told him he needed to stop talking about doing this. That incident makes it back to superiors at the Reserves, who in turn reach back out to the Sheriff's office (who already knew about the concerns from back in May) –

By now it’s September and the Army reserve tells them look, we’re really concerned about this guy – he’s talking about shooting up places.

So, the Sheriff’s office goes to check on him at his home. And although they believe they hear him inside, he won’t come to the door – so this is the massively poor decision they make – because they are afraid that he may be armed and mentally unstable – they decide to just leave him be.

They know he’s not well, they know he has 10 to 15 guns, they know he’s been making threats about mass shootings – but they leave without ever making contact with him. The sergeant does reach back out to the Reserves and the family to maybe get a better grip on what’s been going on.

So, another huge mistake – the captain at the Army Reserves says, you know what, I think you should just leave him alone. Give him some time.

So, the sheriff’s sergeant calls Card’s brother who says he’ll try to get his guns away from him and he and their dad will try to make sure he can’t get them. And that was that. No one at the sheriff’s office ever saw or talked to Card, never asked for a medical evaluation under the yellow flag law – nothing else was done.

And within a few weeks he’d legally purchase more guns and killed 18 people and wounded 13 more in that bar and bowling alley in Lewiston Maine.

His target could have just as easily been a school full of kids, a high school football game, a college bookstore.

Laws are only as good as the people who enforce them. And in this case, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was a red flag, a yellow flag or a purple flag law – if there’s no urgency on the part of police officers to enforce the law.

And it could have been that the extra step of needing to get this man to a doctor for an examination and have that doctor put something in writing before going to a judge – that extra step may have caused the police to go – you know what – nothing’s gonna’ happen and that’s a lot of trouble. What doctor would I even take him to? I mean really, what doctor wants that responsibility? Liability? And they put themselves in danger – taking away someone’s guns.

I honestly don’t know what the bottom line is here – it’s honestly maddening what we’ve allowed to happen as far as guns – period. All I can say is a) find out what’s going on at your kid’s schools as far as security and safety and reporting and drilling and if you feel there are issues, say something. Make a stink. Get involved with Moms Demand Action or another organization. Get the facts, find out the laws in your state Call or write your state representatives, your congressman. VOTE.

And I’ll continue my research and report back as soon as possible. In the meantime, I’ll have links to everything I mentioned here – so check it out.

That’s it for Speaking of Teens today. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the show, I would really, really appreciate if you’d give us a 5-star rating and write a review in Apple – it will help potential listeners know the show is worth listening to!

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Until next time, remember, a little change goes a long way.