Only a few days ago, I had the opportunity to plant a gun in a school.
The doors were unlocked. There was no security guard. No office staff was signing visitors in. No one was monitoring the surveillance cameras.
It was Saturday morning, and I was attending my son’s recreational basketball game at a local public middle school. The school was wide open. I could have easily walked in with a duffle bag slung over my shoulder, an AR-15 and ammo hidden inside. If I was a student, I could have stashed the weapon in my locker, but the heap of lost and found items would make a good hiding place too. And just that easily, I would have secreted away a weapon for easy access.
There’s always a way to get a weapon into a school. More than once I thought about this as I watched students at my daughter’s charter school pass through metal detectors. They pulled three-ring binders, laptops, cell phones – anything with metal – from their bookbags and passed them around the detector. But couldn’t a pistol be hidden in a binder and pass into the school undetected?
As controversy swirls around efforts to keep guns out of schools –school officers, armed teachers, wanding, metal detectors – we must remember these steps alone cannot protect against every determined and resourceful would-be school shooter. It’s not enough to try to stop violent plans already in the execution stage. Instead, we must understand what leads young people to act violently and implement comprehensive, proactive measures to address the underlying causes.
Dr. Terry Levy of Evergreen Psychotherapy Center co-authored “Kids Who Kill: Attachment Disorder, Antisocial Personality, and Violence” in the aftermath of the Columbine school shooting. In it, he pointed to evidence of the relationship between early childhood trauma and violence.
Research has shown elevated cortisol levels caused by early childhood trauma, typically chronic abuse and neglect, can impact a young child’s brain development. As a result, they may struggle with emotional regulation, linking cause-and-effect, abstract thinking, and other high-level brain functions. Not all, but some of these children may become aggressive and violent.
The correlation between early childhood trauma and violence is frightening given the number of students at risk. According to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Initiative at Johns Hopkins, almost half of all children have experienced at least one type of childhood trauma. As a result, a staggering number of students walk into our schools every day with a festering wound borne of childhood trauma. Most often, the wound is unrecognized and untreated. At best, we might slap on a band aid, but rarely do we treat the underlying trauma.
We’ve known about the link between childhood trauma and violence for 20 years, yet little has changed. Our society does not recognize the devastating impact of childhood trauma on it’s victims or the collateral damage on our community as a whole. We do not prioritize funding for research needed for prevention and meaningful treatments. And as a result, our communities continue to face acts of violence from young people.
Just last month we learned about four North Carolina (my home state) middle school students who were planning a Columbine style attack on their school. This was thwarted, but you can be sure many other future attacks will not be stopped in time. For a determined would-be school shooter, there’s always a way.
Childhood trauma is an epidemic in our society and without treatment, children will not heal and will have little hope for a happy and productive future. For some, their trauma wound will grow so unbearably painful they’ll lash out violently. No metal detector, locked door, gun sniffing dog, or wand will stop them.
