Securing schools

Not really my place to start telling Americans what to do with their gun laws. Why anyone would need an automatic rifle / handgun which shoots 30 rounds at a time for domestic use (yes, I know you found your neighbour who is supposed to be a strict Christian in bed with your wife, but 30 rounds sounds a bit like overkill? Maybe? Well OK, you would have preferred 60) ....

Anyway your heart goes out to the parents of the young children brutally slain in Connecticut. Words fail me as to what would drive anyone to kill children like that. Some things in this often brutal world are beyond comprehension.

One suggestion that has arisen about preventing a repeat of this comes from the NRA in the US. NRA (explained principally for the benefit of foreigners who do not know this fact) stands for National Rifle Association (the "N" does not stand for "Nutty" or "Nauseating" incidentally), and they are strong advocates for the Second Amendment rights in the US constitution which is all to do with the right to bear arsenals - sorry "arms"!

Their suggestion involves essentially putting armed guards in front of every school in the US. Ignoring comments that I have read from seditious American "Leftists" in the past few days that on the day of the notorious Columbine High School massacre back in 1999 that the school in question did have armed guards "protecting" the place (so the suggestion will not necessarily work ....) - and after all denying the constitutional rights of the likes of Adam Lanza to bear arms would obviously have been a mistake - I will look at school security in the light of my experiences as a teacher in England back in the 1970s.

I have extremely good memory powers, and unfortunately I can still remember much about the school where I spent  most of my teaching career in the late 70s - "unfortunately" as the nightmares often still come back.

To bear in mind - no two schools are structured or administered the same way.

This particular school had been amalgamated from two separate schools on the same site in a fit of passionate Socialist idealism which regarded pragmatism as an unfortunate obstacle that gets in the way of clear idealistic thinking and planning (why they do not apply the thinking when it comes to bankers wrecking economies usw, I never do get - education seems fine for idealism, politicos tend to lose this idealism when it comes to taxation & regulations usw for some strange reason).

Logistically it was summat of a nightmare. There were two sets of buildings. To the front of one set was a main road. Go 500 metres and turn left, go down another not insignificant road for about 200 metres, you came to the other set of buildings. Surrounding the buildings on the other sides were the fairly extensive sports fields - football (North American = soccer) pitches for the boys, hockey (North American = field hockey) pitches for the girls, in summer (no jokes here about the summer in England incidentally - in 1975 and 1976 there were real summers!) these could be converted into athletic tracks or cricket pitches.

At one end the school was definitely fenced off from the private property and public walkways to be found there. I imagine that it was also the case at the other end (I never went to find out), but as a lot of kids used to walk home that way at the end of the school day, I imagine that any fence was not too effective at providing 100% security.

There were meanwhile at least five entrances from the roads to the school and a parking bay where school buses dropped off kids who were brought in daily from the surrounding villages. This bay was conveniently situated next to the school, so there was no requirement to go to any main entrance from there.

With me so far?

Your challenge at this point is to turn this establishment, at least as it then stood, into a secure property which security guards can protect.

Fence off the outside, close all the entrances except one, put in metal detectors ..... Fine, that quick and easy, eh? Think of airports, restrict areas of movement from the outside and you are there?

Give me that as an answer and you get sent home with extra homework!

Right to start with - the fence. This has to be secure.  Vandal-proof. Might I suggest electronic fencing. Electronic fencing will keep villains out, right? Not voting against electronic fencing personally, but remember that what serves to keep villains out (getting frazzled as they try to break in) also impacts other less villainous individuals.

This is a school, remember. Some kids are curious to the point of being utterly stupid. And sticking up a very large sign saying "do not touch the fence, you might get frazzled!" will not always work. Some will still have an unstoppable urge to risk touching it (to see what happens) while the academically less gifted might not even be able to read what the sign says!

And then of course there is the matter of private property and public walkways on the other side of the fence. People out walking with their dogs do not want Rover coming back .... well totally frazzled! So the problem is how to keep the fence out of reach from outside.

Leaving this excellent question unanswered (someone has already answered it somewhere - there are plenty of electronic fences in use for security elsewhere), I will move on to the now single main entrance, metal detectors, our wonderful ever-alert security guard (sorry, excuse me while I wake him up again - the problem with appointing retirees is that they need more sleep. The head of the NRA suggested retirees incidentally - not my proposal).

You then have the rather interesting point of how you get all the children into the school through the one entrance. In my teaching years this would have meant getting approximately 1,300 kids (between the ages of 11 and 18) into the school. They would tend to arrive in a 30 minute period between 0820 and 0850. Divide 1,300 by 30 you get 43.3 recurring per minute. And who are all now obliged to pass through the metal detectors.

Ask people at airports if this can be done (expect hilarious laughter or a look of shock). Ask people at airports what sort of items set off the alarm on metal detectors. Which is why mobile 'phones need to go with your hand luggage through a special device. I don't know about the US or the UK or Germany, but in Scandinavia a recent survey indicated that some 85-90% of kids would expect to have a mobile 'phone with them during the day (parents also appreciate the possibility of having their kids contactable by such, even if the kids use them more for social purposes).

Metal detectors sounding alarms every few seconds, 1 child passing through them every one and a half seconds, and an old security guard on his own trying to deal with this.

And then imagine the situation when a 15-year-old girl sets this off, she cannot understand why it has gone off, and the old (male!) guard decides that he has to search her? After all she could be hiding a handgun in her underwear ....

Suddenly you need a female security guard, right?

Given all the factors involved, the original proposal as stands can never work. Simply put.

The number of guards necessary (and the number of access points) has to increase, the processing has to be far more efficient, the time factor has to be more realistic, and the personnel have to be trained professionals and quick enough to react if there is an emergency. How quickly would even a retired policeman react when faced by a fit young man armed with an automatic rifle. The chances are that he would be dead before he had time to even think. The first of many if these school killings are anything to go by.

And did I mention the cost involved?

Providing PROPER security to all schools if you want armed guards and the like in a country the size of the United States is going to be, like it or not, very expensive! And at a time when the politicians are involved in a noisy debate about cutting public expenditure, reducing the deficit usw, adding massively to the cost of school security will only means an increase in education costs which have to be taken from elsewhere.

That is the financial logic of the argument.

But the security of the kids is paramount?

Of course it is.

There have to be ways to keep guns out of schools there and everywhere else in the world for that matter (there have been two instances of these atrocities with guns in schools in Germany since the start of the 21st century - in Erfurt in 2002 and in Winnenden near Stuttgart in 2009). But the solutions have to be clear and well thought out, not a series of sound bytes full of obvious logical flaws through which even someone like myself, who is no expert on security, can drive the proverbial coach and horses.