Our country’s education system must fundamentally change. From Thurston and Columbine to Sandyhook and Silver Rail, and all the schools, students and teachers in between. If you think that a successful education system looks like a former student returning to their school with a gun and ammunition to inflict death and destruction, you are sadly, and sorely, mistaken.
Our country’s lack of adequate gun control is a huge problem. Teenagers should not be wielding weapons of mass destruction. No one person, not a single soul, should own a gun without proper background checks, licensing and training; all of these, together before owning a killing machine. Our nations’ founding fathers could not fathom the life we are living now and I believe would never condone the way we interpret the 2nd amendment to allow for such loose laws regarding gun ownership and use.
System failure does not excuse behavior. System failure also does not discount the innumerable positive outcomes produced, particularly in Bend and its schools, and specifically with the shooting at Silver Rail. As demonstrated last week, systems can fail and render success at the same time. Preventing tragedy looks like communities and their leaders holding systems accountable for lacking adequate processes that keep everyone safe, and free from preventable trauma. We are constantly reacting; re-traumatizing and re-victimizing students.
Safety is not always about locked doors. Upstream, there is so much work to do. Locked doors are not guarantees of safety as we have repeatedly experienced. How are we taking care of one another? When we see a child struggling upstream, what are we doing as a community to ensure their safe navigation of the ever-changing stream? It is not one person, or even one system’s, job to ensure safety. It is a collaboration among community partners.
Bend must find and fix the gaps in collaborative care.