Palliative Security

The Bush Administration’s overreaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, continues to ripple across our increasingly violent and fearful society. The United States leads the world in gun ownership and gun violence. Powerful, largely rightwing forces within our society are determined to keep it that way. It should surprise no one that the election of a black, liberal President saw a corresponding rise in gun purchases.

Those who see gun ownership as a God-given—or at least Constitution-given—right dismiss the alarming statistics: more than 30,000 gun deaths a year (about three every hour), some 70,000-plus non-fatal gunshot wounds a year. They fail to see a problem in the fact that during the 20-year Vietnam War period, between 1955 and 1975, more than 58,000 U.S. service members were killed, slightly less than the number of U.S. civilian gun deaths in any two-year period.

In recent weeks I have visited a number of public schools in Indiana. Most, especially in the wake of the elementary school shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, are instituting new security measures, such as locked entrance doors with cameras. One school I visited had begun locking all interior doors: offices, classrooms, library, and so on. Observers, whether school staff or visitors, were issued a master key to allow them to enter classrooms without interrupting the lesson by knocking for admittance.

Children and educators increasingly work in prison-like conditions in many schools. Ironically, the security measures are largely palliative, designed to provide the illusion of safety rather than true security.

In that school with all the locked doors, every door featured a large glass window. The locked library was behind a wall of glass. The camera-equipped entrance doors to the school: all glass. Any would-be armed assailant determined to enter the school or any room within it could do so with relative ease. Such security measures affect only the law-abiding, not those with criminal intent.

I’m reminded of the wag who commented, “One guy in a plane tries to set his shoe on fire and now millions of passengers every day have to take off their shoes to get through airport security.”

This is not to minimize the devastation that one deranged gunman brought to a small community in Connecticut. But exceptionality should not be used as an excuse for universality. Teachers are routinely taught not to punish the entire class for the transgression of one or two students. Yielding to unreasonable fears and spending money that could be used for teaching and learning on unnecessary and ineffective security apparatus for schools is sad and worrying. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is piquant. Fear is seldom a motivator for good. Roosevelt was talking about the Great Depression, of course, not gun-toting killers. But the sentiment is transferable.

In the same inaugural address Roosevelt also, in the same context, said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” I would suggest that the dark realities of the present moment are not would-be assailants lurking near schools, ready to invade classrooms and gun down children and teachers. Such incidents are exceptions, dreadful, tragic exceptions. The dark realities are our unreasoning fears, which pierce the hearts and minds of parents, educators, and most damagingly, children.

Locked glass doors won’t keep out a determined killer but do send a dangerous and damaging message to children, namely that they live in an uncertain world, a world in which they need to be constantly afraid. What kind of educational message is that?