Why isn't our Society Safe?

In the wake of the shooting and hostage situation in Bailey, Colorado this week, and the subsequent murder of a principal in Wisconsin, media stories have been flooding networks and newspapers with the basic question: Why aren't our schools safe? and What can we do to improve school safety? Unfortunately, they miss the target.

Schools, we need constant reminding, are embedded in society. They are a social institution connected in complicated and numerous ways to other organizations, social institutions, and people. Schools are not some lucky isolated Pacific island where we can fix all the world's problems with a little more homework and another lockdown drill.

Until we can face and discuss the violence in our society, and then how that violence seeps into the schools, we won't get much traction on making schools safe. Many students are angry and disfunctional, and that, combined with easy access to weapons springing from at late 18th century mentality, and a misreading of the Constitution, turns those students into impulsive revenge killers.

We have them, and will continue to have them, until we are willing to secure our right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness through aggressive social control of dangerous weapons.

We have them, and will continue to have them until we are willing to confront our how our culture has broken communities from unhappiness and anomie generated by gross materialism.

"Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total... Man (sic) has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his own creations, and has lost ownership of himself."
--Erich Fromm

We will have them and continue to have them until schools can shed their misguided attempts to keep the world and its problems barricaded outside of the main doors and begin to advocate in the community for social change beyond the schoolyard. Any less is attempting to do the impossible while simultaneously shirking responsibility.