What to do about school violence?
By Doug Wyllie "How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America
in the past 50 years? Kids killed... school fire... North America... 50
years... How many? Zero. That's right. Not one single kid has been
killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a
century. Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?" So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave
Grossman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology
professor, and without a doubt the world's foremost expert on human
aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace
Officers Association, was held in the auditorium of a very large
community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by
more than 250 police officers from around the region. Grossman's talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law
enforcement, such as the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot
wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others.
But violence among and against children was how the day began, and so
I'll focus on that issue here. "In 1999," Grossman said, "school violence claimed what at the time was
an all time record number of kids' lives. In that year there were 35
dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the
school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say,
'That's the year Columbine happened, that's an anomaly.' Well, in 2004
we had a new all time record - 48 dead in the schools from violence. How
many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let's assign some grades. Put your
teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give
the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An 'A,' right? Reluctantly,
reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an 'A,' right? Danged
firefighters, they sleep 'till they're hungry and eat 'till they're
tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence?
Come on, what's our grade? Needs improvement, right?" Johnny Firefighter, A+ Student "Why can't we be like little Johnny Firefighter?" Grossman asked as he
prowled the stage. "He's our A+ student!" He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall
like thunder, "Denial, denial, denial!" Grossman commanded, "Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up
there? They're hard to spot - they're painted black - but they're there.
While you're looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You
know that that stuff was selected because it's fire-retardant. Now look
over there above the door - you see that fire exit sign? That's not just
any fire exit sign - that's a
'battery-backup-when-the-world-ends- it-will-still-be-lit' fire exit
sign." Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall,
Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed,
"Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they're what?!
Fireproof or fire retardant. There is not one stinking thing in this
room that will burn!" Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, "But you've
still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants
outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these
fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this
fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single
kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years! "But you try to prepare for violence - the thing much more likely to
kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to
kill our kids in schools - and people think you're paranoid. They think
you're crazy. ...They're in denial." Teaching the Teachers The challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to
overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first
overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school
administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers,
although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public,
must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep
that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must
train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are
intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what
they can do in the event of an attack. "Come with me to the library at Columbine High School," Grossman said.
"The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her
professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if
there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have
instinctively, reflexively known what to do. "But the thing most likely to kill her kids - the thing hundreds of
times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn't have a clue what
to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian's office but she
didn't know that. So she did the worst thing possible - she tried to
secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide
in the library - a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It's
an aquarium, it's a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl.
What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish
bowl." Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a
fraction of the money they'd spent preparing for fire doing lockdown
drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers
they face, the outcome that day may have been different. Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, "If somebody had spent five
minutes telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have
been saved at Columbine?" Arming Campus Cops is Elementary "Never call an unarmed man 'security'," Grossman said. "Call him 'run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up' but never
call an unarmed man security. "Imagine if someone said, 'I want a trained fire professional on site. I
want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No
fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge,
the uniform - that will keep us safe - but we have no need for fire
extinguishers.' Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane,
delusional, legally liable, to say, 'I want a trained security
professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform,
and I want a security badge, but I don't want a gun.' It's not the hat,
the uniform, or the badge. It's the tools in the hands of a trained
professional that keeps us safe. "Our problem is not money," said Grossman. "It is denial." Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important
things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or
next-to-nothing. Grossman's Five D's Let's contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman's
"Five D's." While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area
below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas. 1. Denial - Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said
Grossman. 2. Deter - Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer
assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school
drops to almost zero 3. Detect - We're talking about plain old fashioned police work here.
The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn't
happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is
paramount. 4. Delay - Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to
put time and distance between the killers and the kids. a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry.
Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target. b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with)
the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what
it looks like when you do your response. 5. Destroy - Police officers and agencies should consider the following: a. Carry off duty. No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire
extinguisher in his trunk that he's crazy or paranoid.
b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle. One chief of police,
upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, "If an active killer
strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per
second."
c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America. Any
infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue
under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent
job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the
function.
d. Have a "go-to-war bag" filled with lots of loaded magazines and
supplies for tactical combat casualty care.
e. Use helicopters. Somewhere in your county you probably have one or
more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast
guard rotors.
f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have
available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your
active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put
well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300
pounds per square inch.
g. Armed citizens can help. Think United 93. Whatever your personal
take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing
is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather
than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response. Coming Soon: External Threats Today we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that
had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also
must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered
children in their own religion - they have killed wantonly, mercilessly,
and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you
think they'd think of killing our kids? "Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know
what they're going to do next? No! But one thing they've done in every
country they've messed with is killing kids in schools," Grossman said. The latest al Qaeda charter states that "children are noble targets" and
Osama bin Laden himself has said that "Russia is a preview for what we
will do to America." What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this
context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 - the very day on
which children across that country merrily make their return to school
after the long summer break - radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya
took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the
three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more
than half of whom were children. "If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help
them understand the terrorist's plan, it would be Terror at Beslan by
John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they're planning
to do to the United States," he said. Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in
America. It would require every enlisted person and every officer in the
entire Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps combined to put just one
armed guard on every school bus in the country. As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford
our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them
from fire. Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for
violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that
today.
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