Gun laws and policies don’t serve students

If you’ve tried to adjust your schedule or apply for a parking pass on The Nest recently, you’ve likely been prompted to watch a grainy 12-year-old video called “Shots Fired: When Lightning Strikes,” which advises students on how to protect themselves in the event of an active shooter on campus.

While certainly well-intentioned, this video’s outdatedness speaks to a larger issue of students’ voices being drowned out in the national debate over how to solve campus gun violence.

There are few issues of greater concern to students in 2019 than addressing on-campus gun violence. Yet outdated and misguided proposals from politicians and schools continue to distract from meaningful and practical change, exemplified by a recently proposed Pennsylvania bill which would fund bulletproof infrastructure and increased security efforts in schools through a 10 percent sales tax on violent video games.

It is similar to another bill proposed in Rhode Island which would funnel profits from a video game sales tax into mental health services in schools.

The memo for Rep. Christopher Quinn’s (R-Delaware) bill cites unspecified research, which claims to show a correlation between aggressive behavior and video games. What it does not do is state a direct link between video games with violent content and school shootings. The bill also fails to mention guns even once.

Quinn’s bill is yet another installment in the series of misguided attempts to address campus gun violence without actually broaching the root issue of gun policy in the U.S.

Whether or not there is a correlation between violent video games and mass shootings—and social scientists have yet to find such a link—this bill would do nothing to prevent the sale of guns to people who shouldn’t have them.

The bill’s focus on managing gun violence, rather than preventing it, is visible in the rhetoric of the active shooter instructional video which all St. Joe’s students are required to watch on The Nest.

The video is used at several other colleges and provides guidelines on how students can keep themselves safe in the event of an active shooter. Its title, “Shots Fired: When Lightning Strikes,” refers to the rarity of mass school shootings.

While it is true that school shootings are rare, their rate of occurrence has more than doubled since the video was created in 2007. Data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security shows that 2018 was the deadliest year for school shootings during the 48-year timeframe analyzed by the Center.

Of course, schools have a responsibility to make sure their students are provided with practical, in-depth knowledge of how to respond to potential safety threats, active shooters included.

The problem with the video lies in both its outdatedness and the fact that, when it stands alone in how schools respond to the possibility of an active shooter, students lack information on how they can engage with their political representatives to lessen the threat of a campus shooting occurring in the first place.

Bills like Rep. Quinn’s only serve as distractions from greater issues like gun over-availability. Even if Pennsylvania and Rhode Island decide to start taxing video games in a misguided effort to decrease aggressive behavior, there will still be 67 million more guns than people in the U.S. and too many politicians who will blame the issue of campus gun violence on everything but guns.

Students know this. The survivors of the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who later organized the March for Our Lives protest, exemplify the generation most impacted by campus gun violence and are most equipped to make recommendations on how to confront it.

One year following the Parkland shooting, and in the wake of yet another incident of multiple-casualty gun violence in Aurora, Il. on Feb. 15, we need to be moving away from rhetoric that centers on managing the issue of campus gun violence and moving toward models of actionable political change.

With all due respect to creators of mandatory active shooter response training videos and legislators looking for creative ways to address school shootings, the solution to eliminating campus gun violence is more straightforward than a video game sales tax, and it’s already been proposed by students living under the reality of increasingly common school shootings. Let’s take our cues from them.

—The Editorial Board