As a father, the tragedy at Newtown, Connecticut, shook me to the core. It was a reminder to all of us that horrible things can happen, they can happen without warning, and they can happen anywhere.
But there is another aspect to these tragedies that happen all too often – as much as we hear about them on the news, as horrible as they are, they are still rare events.
Still, when things like a bomb scare at an elementary school happens here, we feel a little different and we feel a little less safe. The good news is that it was a very destructive hoax – it wasted the valuable time of district personnel, teachers, students, parents, emergency services and our broader community.
If this had been a drill about emergency preparedness, I think the district passed with flying colors. They were able to get the communication to the parents and the community. The teachers and students, at least, handled it without panicking.
So why am I writing all of this? As I was reading the comments of my favorite local newspaper columnist, I realized just how much we allow these incidents to destroy our sense of well-being, safety and security.
The columnist writes, “It should be noted that had this been a true terrorist threat of some sort, our children were incredibly vulnerable as they sat on the lawn outside Rainbow City.
“Understandably, police and fire resources were directed to the school building itself to make sure it was safe for students to return … but had the bomb threat been a ruse to empty the school and put our children in harm’s way, we’d be second-guessing ourselves forever…
“The point here is that there was no ‘protection’ of any sort at Rainbow City … there was no police presence there or in the parking lot at the Davis Arts Center or along Covell Boulevard, which runs just a few yards to the north of where the kids were gathered … perhaps it has to do with police staffing concerns that need to be addressed or perhaps it was simply an oversight …
“All I know for sure is that the site where the kids were happily waiting out this several hour interruption in their school day was not secure … at the very least it’s something we need to talk about …”
The columnist later adds that “while most of us with children at North Davis Elementary probably felt down deep that there was no bomb planted at the school, it did remind us of just how vulnerable all our schools are …”
Or are they?
As one person noted, very few kids ever get killed in school shootings. One person posted, the chances of a shooting incident at a K-12 in the US in any given year is about 1:54000. Compare that to the fact that on “average in 2012, 92 people were killed on the roadways of the U.S. each day in 30,800 fatal crashes” and we may be worried about the wrong danger here.
Our kids are vulnerable, but they are probably more vulnerable to the unsafe driving around our schools than a remote terrorist threat.
This year alone, I have been hit once at the Montgomery parking lot by a parent who suddenly decided to speed up BACKWARDS to get a parking spot. I saw her coming but could not move in time to avoid her. Luckily the kids were in class and no one was hurt.
A few weeks later, the same thing almost happened again. This time I was able to honk on the horn while the other driver insisted the car had the right to back up to get a spot that they had passed in the parking lot.
Just this week my dash cam caught video of a driver in a car that decided to jump the stop sign at the three-way stop outside Montgomery, despite the fact there were cars at each point along the way – I was starting my left turn and the car had to swerve as it illegally sped through the intersection. Unfortunately no front license plate means we will never know who did it, most likely – but kids in the back of my car were put at risk, not by some terrorist but by some impatient driver.
The columnist mentions the possibility of a ruse to lure the children out in front of the school – but if that’s the point, why not simply come by after school when kids are everywhere and law enforcement is nowhere to be seen?
There is no doubt that people are worried when these type of things happen, but at some point we have to be guided by logic and reason. Airplanes occasionally crash and sometimes several hundred people die in them, but the chance of any given plane crashing is less than the chance of being struck by lightning – in fact, you’re more likely to be killed on your way to the airport than on a plane.
We can’t protect ourselves from every devious way a bad guy could possibly get us. Just as we continue to drive cars and cross the street despite measured risks, we have to continue living our lives and we cannot allow fear to consume us.
I’m not being fatalistic here. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take reasonable precautions. I wear my seat belt. I have airbags that are deployable in my car. My kids sit in child restraints. We have engineering standards and we continue to improve road safety.
We eliminate or attempt to eliminate things that make it more likely to have fatal accidents, things like alcohol. We need to do more about distracted driving.
I don’t want to send my kids to campuses that look like prisons with barbed wire, metal detectors, armed guards, etc. That is a way of life in some urban schools. We can argue about whether those are helpful or necessary, but one of the reasons I chose to live in Davis is I didn’t want to live that way.
We have risks, but I would prefer to worry about things like road safety and nutrition than the remote chance someone is going to actually plant explosive devices at a school or that we have an active shooter situation. Reasonable precautions, but at the end of the day, focus on the real dangers.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
With road safety and nutrition, the risks are variable and known, and children can be educated to make choices in life to mitigate them. Conversely, acts of terrorism are absolute risks that cannot be known and so we have no choice but to over-compensate in protection and planned response.
The Al Qaeda terrorist murders in France of the Charlie Hebdo staff, unarmed police officers and innocent Jewish citizens is a wake up call that a simple statistical risk calculation is inadequate. It is inadequate because terrorism risks are largely random and incalculable from an individual perspective.
But there is another bigger reasons to consider when pondering this question of over-compensation. Following the terrorism attack on 9-11 and again with this atrocity in France, western nationalism is on the rise. Peaceful Muslims will likely suffer from more restrictive immigration laws and racial profiling. Western liberals will of course loudly oppose these changes in the name of civil rights.
And the terrorists understand and leverage this social and political absurdity so common in the west and with human emotion. They know both sophisticated and unsophisticated cultures develop sensitivities over much softer concerns and lose their ability to recognize and accept the hard challenges. Terrorists kill with impunity largely to foment this social and political conflict over soft and hard concerns to drive a deep wedge into western society.
So a simple statistical comparison of injury or death from acts of terrorism, or roads and nutrition, is erroneous. The later has much larger socio-political consequences that lead to many more problems and risks for children. The former are largely just standard risks of human existence… and risks that are mitigated simply by educating for individual choice.
“The Al Qaeda terrorist murders in France of the Charlie Hebdo staff, unarmed police officers and innocent Jewish citizens is a wake up call that a simple statistical risk calculation is inadequate”
is it or are we simply overreacting to a bad but otherwise small and limited event? we give the terrorists a ton of power when we react that way. whereas more than those people typically die on the roads each weekend and we hardly notice.
DP, sounds kind of like the ton of power we give activists when we overreact when one officer shoots a black guy who is charging at him in Ferguson whereas more blacks die each day at the hands of another black and we hardly notice.
Following the school shootings over the last several years, gun control advocacy is on the rise. Peaceful, law-abiding gun owners will likely suffer from more restrictive gun ownership laws and screenings. Western conservatives will, of course, loudly oppose these changes in the name of constitutional rights.
And the fact that school children are at much greater risk from domestic nut jobs with guns than from Islamic terrorists will not likely figure into the conversation.
Banning guns is a fruitless pursuit. Besides being politically infeasible, it is a non-solution given the sheer volume of guns and the black market that would develop. And the consequences will result in more victims of gun crime as the bad guys don’t care that guns are illegal, and they grow willing to pay more for them given the lower likelihood that law-abiding soft targets would be packing.
And note that I did not write “Islamic” or “Islamist” terrorist. Terrorism can come from many sources.
I get the worldview difference. Liberals want to ban all dangerous things from all people so they don’t have access to dangerous things to hurt other people. Conservatives want to locate and lock up, ban and eliminate dangerous people so the rest have freedom to not have things banned.
One works much better than the other, but we lack the will and honesty to admit it.
I agree that banning guns is fruitless. I think that profiling Muslims (your words) and restricting immigration as an exercise in public safety would be a fruitless pursuit as well, with many unintended consequences and little effect. Interesting that you cite the “volume” and “black market” for guns. I think there’s a pretty strong “volume” and “black market” for immigration as well.
Given our recent history on this topic, I’m more than a little concerned about how conservatives will go about defining “dangerous people” and what steps they support to “ban and eliminate” them.
I note you didn’t address my core point: that school children are at much great risk from people coming onto school grounds with guns than they are from bombs or acts of terrorism. What steps do you propose we take to locate, lock up, ban, and eliminate the perpetrators of mass school shootings? Seems to me they are mostly young American males. Any way we can profile for that, and put them into preventive detention?
Traffic accidents, barring acts of nature are almost entirely preventable by long known and well publicized measures. Too many drivers and parents choose to eschew these measures, in favor of expediency and the mayhem is massive. Based on the last five years of statistical data, your or a loved ones chances of dying in an automobile accident, about 1 in 19,000. Chances of being killed by terrorists: about 1 in 20,000,000. You were 4 times more likely to be hit by lightning.
Awareness is the greatest security system you can develop. Training administrators, teachers, aides and support staff to be observant of their surroundings, and familiar with who should be on campus and who doesn’t belong should be de rigueur.
Educating people to drive within the limits of reason and law is an achievable goal.
;>)/
yes our kids and frankly most of us are vulnerable if a bad person walked down the street with a gun and opened fire. fortunately that is unlikely.
“We can’t protect ourselves from every devious way a bad guy could possibly get us. Just as we continue to drive cars and cross the street despite measured risks, we have to continue living our lives and we cannot allow fear to consume us.”
I agree with this wholeheartedly. RR has pointed out several times the insane fear lifestyle in which parents drive their kids to school in Davis due to some weird media fear culture that has taken over society, at the expense of additional daily emissions and health detractions due to kids not walking or biking, compounding the already too sedentary distractions of modern life. There would have been no incidents at the school with the stupid people driving as described above if most of the kids rode bikes. Ironically, all the kids on bikes would be safer if all those parents didn’t drive their kids to school out of cultural fear.
However, before I even read the Dunning article I had the exact thought as Dunning did. It isn’t so much that it is remotely likely that this would happen to be the time someone created a ruse to get all the kids in one place in order to gun them down, it’s that the person calling in the bomb threat has total control over the situation, the students, and the administration. That should be of concern to everyone. Once they know the procedures, “they” can manipulate the situation to put everyone in harm’s way with a single phone call.
To give an idea of how dumb school administrators can be, I site a bomb scare at my high-school in Palo Alto in about 1978. The school received a bomb threat around 7:30am — before school started — that a bomb would go off at 10:00am. At 9:40am, the students were evacuated to the field while a search was conducted. Yes, you heard right, the administrators decided to let students come to school with a bomb threat, and evacuated the school only twenty minutes before the potential bomber said the bomb was to go off. The administrators actually took the word of the potential bomber, AND assumed they were good enough to accurately set a fuse to go off hours in the future, right on time.
No bomb was found that day. However, a couple of months later, a janitor found a pipe bomb on the roof of the school beneath an overhang with a fizzled fuse. No one was sure when the bomb was planted and therefore not sure if it was tied to the bomb threat. However, the police said had the bomb gone off, it would have severely damaged that building and shattered windows across four-lane Middlefield Road.
But hey, when someone threatens a bomb to go off at 10:00am, I tend to believe them, and I am sure they know how to set a timer, especially a fuse. And did they account for Daylight Savings Time?
As for the lack of police presence overseeing the children at Rainbow something, whatever that is, people often seem perplexed as to why there aren’t armies of police officers eliminating the deadly threat of bicycles running stop signs and riding without lights. Truth is, there is no army of cops. I recently heard the number of police vehicles deployed at any one time in all of Davis, and I believe it is 3 or 4 (correction welcome), depending on the time of day. While I’m sure on-call officers were immediately called, there would be a delay of probably tens or more minutes.
I’m not saying we are under threat here, but we are somewhat on our own, and procedures should not put children in harms way through predictability. The administrators should regularly be drilled in multiple scenarios and mix it up, and perhaps we should teach our children that when the teacher tells you to all gather in one place – you, son/daughter: “save yourself – run away from your fellow sheep/lemmings and don’t look back”.
Just for a little risk-analysis and perspective….
School shootings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
School bombings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:School_bombings_in_the_United_States
It’s pretty clear which is the greater risk.
“save yourself – run away from your fellow sheep/lemmings and don’t look back”.
So now imagine that you have several hundred children ages 6- 12 or so running in all directions in a panic each trying to separate themselves from all the other “lemmings”.
Some run through the park, others onto the nearby streets full of traffic. Others hide and are too afraid to come out even when the adults perceive that all is clear. This kind of chaos does not sound to me like a safer strategy.
I’m not concerned. Most parents will keep their children in the “sheep” category.
“I’m more than a little concerned about how conservatives will go about defining “dangerous people” and what steps they support to “ban and eliminate” them.”
I am not afraid that I am going to die from Ebola. I am not afraid that I am going to die in a terrorist attack regardless of the identity of the terrorist. The statistics on these events argue that this is not where I should be directing my concern.
I am however, very afraid when the proposal is made that conservatives should be allowed to make the determination of who is and who is not a dangerous individual and to lock up those that they have identified. . A few examples of how very dangerous this can be and has been in the past. Please note, no references to the distant past, although those abound.
1. Careers and lives ruined in the McCarthy era during the communist witch hunts.
2. The paired term “godless liberals” used by Frankly not so long ago during a rant. This alone would be very scary since many believe that if a person is “godless” by the definition of whomever is making the judgement, then they are by definition”dangerous”.
3. The perception that “black men” are dangerous and thus the calls to police for men attempting to enter their own homes, or mowing their own lawns.
A fear driven society pitting one political faction against all those who do not share their belief system and thus are seen as “dangerous” is what Frankly has described, and frankly, it is not one in which I want to live.