After the recent shooting at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland Florida the administration at the school has instituted new safety measures. These include more security on site, the potential use of metal detecting wands, the requirement that all students wear ID badges and the requirement that students use only clear backpacks.
Of all these new safety measures the one requiring students to wear clear backpacks has drawn the most anger and ridicule from students and the media. Students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas can’t seem to understand this measure as anything other than a violation of their own personal privacy and freedom.
Philip DiFranco, a YouTube personality/commentator spoke on this situation on hisYouTube broadcast today. He too Seemed a bit mystified as to why the clear backpack rule was put in place. In this article I would like to explain to you my own views on why this was done.
The first thing that the students have to understand is that they are all the next potential shooter. Even the kids who have risen to national prominence as advocates of gun control like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez are potential shooters.
This is because it is so hard if not impossible to predict who the next person actually is who will commit a school shooting or other act of violence. This fact was the conclusion of a study on the subject which was commissioned by the Secret Service.
So, in reality, what the law-enforcement and school administration at Parkland is facing is very much like what America faced after 911 except on a smaller scale. Everyone wants to be protected from the “bad people” and do not understand why they are included in that web of protection.
In the case of the 911 aftermath we have the TSA at airports doing many of the same things being proposed at Parkland although not quite at the same level. The funny thing is that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies seem to be much more confident in building a profile of the terrorists who may try to attack us than they do of school shooters. This is why every student and teacher must be seen as a potential threat.
In the time since the Parkland shooting it has become obvious that you just do not know who the next shooter will be or who are their intended target(s). In the short span of time since Parkland a 13 year old middle school boy smuggled a .22 rifle into school and onto the bus by hiding it down his pant leg. He ended up shooting himself at school. A science teacher got frustrated and fired shots in his classroom. A young man ended a love relationship by shooting the object of his affections then being killed either by his own hand or a security officer.
Finally we have the woman who shot up YouTube headquarters yesterday. While this was not a school shooting the fact that it was done by a woman goes against the statistics which show the vast majority of mass shootings are committed by males.
This collection of incidents really illustrates they you cannot predict who the next shooter will be and so, by default, we are all potentially the next shooter. Because of this, in order to keep us safe, authorities have to balance on a thin wire between personal freedom and total safety.
So where is that line? Is requiring students to wear clear backpacks simply too much of a nuisance to bother with? I thought about it. What CAN you fit into a backpack that might be used as a weapon? I mean some of the Parkland students were quick to post pictures of clear backpacks with mocking messages on them or clearly seen packages of tampons, condoms and weed/pills but I had a different mental image for a photo.
I thought of taking a clear backpack and putting a variety of things into it. Ok, you couldn’t fit a standard AR-15 or any long gun into a backpack. But there are many semi-automatic handguns out there and even some sort of hybrids like the Israeli made UZI that would fit. So a backpack could easily hold a couple semi-automatic handguns and spare clips.
What else might an enterprising mass killer slip into a backpack? Remember the Boston Marathon bombing? The home made explosive devices were left on the sidewalk in…backpacks.
What else? Some bottles of flammable liquid, rags and a lighter for Molotov Cocktails? Sure. Modern hand grenades are about the size of a baseball so a couple of those too. How about big Bowie knives or old fashioned straight razors or box cutters for the more budget conscious mass killer? Yep all can easily go inside a backpack.
So, to be safe, not knowing who the next attacker will be, authorities have to somehow find out what everyone is bringing into the school. At airports there is the body scanner and the luggage x-ray scanner. Both of which would be prohibitively expensive for most school districts and in the case of the body scanner no doubt cause some outrage among parents.
An alternative would be to manually frisk and search the backpacks of every student every day as they enter school. Just like in the real world, to obtain the kind of security that the students are asking for they may have to give up some of their rights to privacy. There is just no easy way around that fact.