The afternoon of the 30th of November, 2021, shots rang inside Oxford High School in Michigan. Current casualties listed at the time of this writing are 3 known dead, and 6 known injured. A 15 year old student, who was holding a handgun when apprehend by police, is in custody.
This appears to be the first such active shooter incident in Michigan in 40+ years. While crimes involving firearms have strayed into or been committed on school property, and occasionally students had been found with weapons, an actual shooting had thus far been avoided.
That all changed today.
As you readers are probably aware, schools in Michigan are pistol free zones.
The only legal way to bring a handgun onto Michigan school grounds is as a CPL holder and in an openly carried fashion. Firearms are otherwise prohibited from schools and school property.
This did not stop the student, who acquired the handgun in a currently unknown fashion, from bringing the weapon to a high school that serves about 1,500 students this school year.
Readers, it is critically, crucially and potentially of catastrophe preventing importance that firearms be secured well in the home and steps keeping them from those who may seek to abuse them are in place. Adults and teens alike, teens perhaps especially so, since they are still growing and developing their problem solving skills, can be tempted and succumb to the temptation to use a firearm to solve problems that a firearm is not there to solve.
Bullying, harassment, insult, and base injury, these are disturbingly common in the lives of the young men and women in the school systems. It can seem that an easy solution to these temporary conditions is to permanently end them by a violent and dramatic means.
Projectchildsafe.org and organizations like it are emplaced to encourage the responsible storage behaviors, education, and link to resources that mandates and other legal structures cannot provide assurances of.
No law has prevented a school massacre, or any massacre, from taking place by a determined individual or group. We can, however, do more and more to stack the odds in our favor that such tragedies are avoided and well responded to. Acting so that the loss of life is minimized or prevented entirely.
The complex social choices that revolve around the decision of violence are too numerous to put so asininely as, ‘a 15 year old shouldn’t have had a gun‘. Of course they ‘shouldn’t‘ in this context. They also shouldn’t feel that the only reasonable way to solve whatever was happening to them is murder. But both of those things occured and only one of them is going to catch the blame. It will be, for political capital, the gun. It always is.
