School safety is on the top of a lot of people’s minds.
Recently, there have been mass shootings at schools in the United States, and the president has suggested giving teachers the right to carry concealed weapons in the classrooms. This has sparked a lot of controversy.
It seems implausible to me that this could ever happen in Canada, since we don’t have the right to bear arms in the same fashion the U.S. does.
However, if I was an American citizen, I would be outraged. It is unreasonable to think teachers should be allowed to have firearms around children.
Kids, and teenagers, can be unpredictable. Just knowing there is a weapon nearby could cause more harm than it would good.
When I was younger, there was an incident on my bus route, where a student who was angry took the axe from the front of the bus, and came running to the back of the bus, swinging it around in his fit of rage.
Luckily, nobody was seriously injured, but just having that type of weapon in close proximity to students was irresponsible, even if it was installed for safety reasons.
Now take that axe and multiply its effects by a thousand, and you have the severity of a gun.
We have been lucky enough in Golden that no serious incidents have happened in our local high school, but the possibility is always there.
As the United States looks at more ways to implement security in schools, they consider allowing teachers to have guns in classrooms, and they are looking at measures like metal detectors at entrances. They are modifying the security measures in place, and we’re left to watch the whole thing go down.
This doesn’t mean that Golden Secondary School doesn’t have a security plan. In fact, theirs is great, and focuses on taking care of the wellbeing of its students before something devastating happens.
The school, in partnership with the school district and the RCMP have a good program in place to help ensure violent incidents don’t occur. They focus on preventing issues before they happen, and their plan doesn’t include giving weapons to teachers.
We are so fortunate to live in a country where mass shootings are far and few between. But, we can’t ignore that shootings have happened in Canada, and some have taken place within school walls.
Preventing the issue before it arises is a great place to start. The school’s outlook on preventative measures really helps students and staff feel safe while at school.
Hopefully our neighbours to the south can take a page out of our book before putting more weapons into their schools.
It is only a matter of time before that plan backfires.
