In recent weeks the Peace & Justice Center has supported the activism of Bangor-area students calling for an end to gun violence in their schools and the community. The students have come forward with powerful stories of the emotional trauma they experience hearing the stories of mass shootings in schools and living with regular active-shooter drills.
Separate from the fact that our society is apparently willing to keep our children in locked, armed compounds in order to guarantee the “right” of a small minority of the population to carry deadly assault weapons, and separate from the fact that “school security” has become a very expensive industry with limited data on effectiveness, we need to be aware that adding “security” to schools actually creates another serious threat to at least some groups of students.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, those who have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect are much more likely to be isolated and punished in schools. Students of color are especially vulnerable to these trends and the discriminatory application of discipline. The result is what is known as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and the increase in the number of police and resource officers in schools contributes to this pattern of criminalization.
Maine is not exempt from this trend. The Maine ACLU released a report last fall documenting the disproportionate suspension and expulsions of black students compared to white students: “Only 3.1 percent of Maine public school students are black, yet black students experienced 6.2 percent of in-school expulsions, 6.3 percent out-of-school suspensions, 6.5 percent of referrals to law enforcement, 8 percent of expulsions under zero tolerance policies, and 18 percent of corporal punishments in school.”
Students of color at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are very aware of the danger of adding extra security to their school in the wake of the recent mass shooting there. Student Kai Koerber told CNN, “Students of color, black and brown students, like myself have been racially profiled while we are on heightened alert, fearing the emergence of another Caucasian shooter.”
If that wasn’t enough, what if active-shooter drills are themselves traumatizing young people? A recent article in The Atlantic asks the question: “ What are Active Shooter Drills Doing to Kids?” The author points out, “A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life — as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes even by the best of intentions.”
We are desperate to keep our children safe, but there is no solid evidence that adding police, lockdown drills, school resource officers, and lots of expensive security technology to our schools is really keeping children safer, while at least some evidence suggests added security measures are detrimental to particular groups of students.
In fact, the biggest threat of gun violence to young people is in the form of suicide, which added school security is certainly not addressing. There is good evidence that policies such as a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, universal background checks and ongoing gun violence research can reduce gun violence.
Many of us recall the time when cigarette smoking was allowed everywhere. Despite lobbying and misinformation from the tobacco industry and an outcry from smokers about their rights, solid evidence of the harm to nonsmokers led our lawmakers to the reasonable conclusion that the right to smoke should be restricted in order to protect the rights of others to good health. Let’s do the sensible thing and apply this same standard to guns.
Karen Marysdaughter is the co-coordinator of the Bangor based Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine.
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