Detectors Ensure Safer Environment Getting Results No Mass Murders In High-Security Inner City Schools.

To be a parent is to worry.

When your kids are young, you fret whenever they go outside to play. Will a passerby try to kidnap them? Is there a sexual predator living nearby? As they grow older, your concerns mature. Are your kids hanging out with the right crowd? Bottom line: Are they safe?

In the past, most parents were confident that there was at least one safe zone for their children: school. That no longer is true. The gunshots that have rung out in such middle America towns as Moses Lake, Jonesboro, Ark., and now, Springfield, Ore., have riddled the innocent notion.

Now, school may be the most dangerous place a child can go. Ignited by nihilism and pop-culture violence, children are killing children over trivial matters: a puppy love lost, a failing grade, a bad hair day. Attempts to identify and isolate walking time bombs such as Kip Kinkel and Barry Loukaitis are noteworthy. But not enough.

Regrettably, the time has come to put full-scale security systems in our schools. New or remodeled high schools, such as the ones planned in Spokane, Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene, should be designed to limit access. Metal detectors should be installed at the entrances. Lockers should be provided for all students, to eliminate the need for backpacks, which easily conceal weapons.

Sure, those steps are invasive. They create a bunker mentality in a place that should be focused on the joy of learning. But they also send a concrete message to nervous parents, teachers and students that schools are doing everything possible to ensure safety. Air travelers don’t relish walking through hypersensitive metal detectors but they do so, comforted by the knowledge that the exercise makes it safer to fly the increasingly unfriendly skies.

Curiously, the mass murders of school children are taking place in rural America, not in the inner city, where tight security and metal detectors have been in place for years. Proper security could have prevented five of the last six mass school shootings, dating back to Loukaitis’ 1996 rampage at a Moses Lake middle school.

Kids are impulsive. A youth who sneaks a handgun and ammunition into a school, as an 18-year-old did recently at Shadle High Park, may have no intention of hurting anyone. But he has the potential and chance to change his mind. A metal detector would take away that opportunity.