Editorial
Friday, October 20, 2006
Once again, Americans mourn the deaths of innocent schoolchildren and search for ways to protect the living. Shooting sprees at schools in Colorado, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania prompted President Bush to continue that search with a conference on school violence.
Participants at the summit discussed the need for better communication and more values education. And there was plenty of practical and worthwhile talk about improving intelligence, emergency drills, coordination with police and community vigilance to spot potential killers.
Missing from those discussions, however, were two equally important items: federal budget cuts to school safety programs and access to guns.
Any comprehensive strategy to curb school shootings should deal with both subjects. Yet the summit did not address why the administration drastically reduced federal safety resources. While lamenting school violence last week, the president and House Republicans were also outlining a budget that would cut school safety funding by 34 percent compared with 2002 levels.
As part of recent federal cutbacks, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program went from $160 million in the last two years of the Clinton administration to zero this year.
It has been estimated that programs across several federal departments sent more than $900 million to school safety programs in 2001. Today, only $455 million is spent. That reduction defies logic; just as the need for school safety and security measures increases, federal support has gone in the other direction.
Though federal funding is a small percentage of local school budgets, those safety subsidies make a difference for local districts. Already squeezed budgets cannot make up for the losses.
Another topic that was given short shrift during the president's summit was access to guns. The president never mentioned the topic and the First Lady, attorney general and secretary of education talked about it only in passing.
It may be that nothing could have stopped the most recent shooters; it is possible that they would have stopped at nothing to get the firearms they needed to commit these evil acts.
Still, any credible discussion of school safety requires raising the question of how and why teenagers can get guns so easily.
And why does a tormented, suicidal adult, such as the one who shot 10 Amish school girls and killed five of them, have ready access to a semiautomatic pistol, a shotgun, 600 rounds of ammunition and a high-voltage stun gun?
Unfortunately, these questions weren't asked during the president's conference. In fact, gun control advocates were not invited to participate. That void suggests the White House didn't want to offend its anti-gun-control supporters.
But if Americans truly want solutions to the school violence problem, all factors _ including gun access and school-safety budgets _ must be discussed in the search for answers.
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