Education may be best weapon against school shootings

Posted by Justin Goldsborough | 0 comments

I don’t know any other way to start a post about what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School this past week than to say “I’m sorry” and that so many peoples’ thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. I know that’s not even close to being enough. I wish we could do so much more.

I remember when I was in fourth grade and getting ready to start at a new school…a school that was K-12. My parents set me down the night before and had a serious conversation with me about drugs. I had never thought about drugs before. I didn’t know what marijuana was or how to spell it. I wouldn’t have known where to get any weed or what to do with it if I had it in my hand.

All that said, my parents thought it was important for me to be aware in case I might see drugs or be approached by someone trying to sell them at my new school. Now, I was going to a small, private school and looking back it seems kind of laughable that anyone there would have tried to sell drugs to a fourth grader. But this was just a few years into the War on Drugs. Just a few years since Nancy Reagan had launched the Say No to Drugs campaign. And my parents just wanted to make sure I was aware. They weren’t the only ones. A year later in fifth grade, we had a DARE officer come to our school to teach us to Just Say No. After that, there was no way I, or any of my classmates for that matter, could say we didn’t know about drugs, the potential effects and the warning signs.

I remember when I was in fifth grade and we started our AIDS curriculum in science class. One of the main reasons studying AIDS was mandatory was prevention, which won’t surprise you. But the reason there was such a need to state the obvious about how you got AIDS was that it wasn’t that obvious to so many people. Our teacher drilled into our heads all the misconceptions about how you got the disease. And the actual ways you could contract the virus. I still remember them. Sex, blood transfusion, sharing needles and being the child of an HIV carrier.

That same year, Magic Johnson announced he had AIDS. A year or two later, my parents took me to see Philadelphia. This disease had been so taboo to so many in the 1980s and early 90s. But by the time I was in sixth grade, I felt completely comfortable having a conversation about AIDS…and could probably have told most adults more than they knew about it.

People don’t like to talk about mental illness. It’s considered a sign of weakness. It requires asking for help or confronting someone close to you. Some people just don’t believe in it. But what if we did start talking about it?

What if we started discussing mental health issues with our children? What if there was a required curriculum on mental illness and how the brain works in our middle schools? What if we even looked into imposing a mandatory psychiatric screening for all students as they move into their teen-age years, if not sooner?

It’s by no means a perfect solution. But we need to do something. And while I would be all for stricter gun laws, people like the killers we have seen in Newtown and Virginia Tech would have found guns anyway. I firmly believe that.

What if we armed our kids with education? The signs to look for in a person that might indicate they need help with a mental issue. The knowledge that if they are feeling depressed or worse, they’re not the only ones. The importance of getting help for themselves or their friends before things get out of control. The number or person they can contact if they think someone is a danger to those around him/her.

Maybe I’m being idealistic. But maybe if we start having the mental illness conversation more openly in our homes and our schools, there’s a chance we could stop the next senseless killing before it’s too late.