School safety, security, and violence prevention resource

Is any place safe anymore? Last week, on December 12, six teenagers got wounded when they stepped off a bus in Las Vegas. Here’s the news clip from AFP detailing what happened:

Six teenagers were wounded by gunfire Tuesday in a shooting at a school bus stop in Las Vegas, Nevada, local police said.

The shooting took place near a high school in northeastern Las Vegas, and the victims were between 16 and 17 years old, police spokesman Marc Joseph told reporters.

Joseph said the shooting was possibly related to an altercation which took place on Monday.

“It appears to be juveniles …around 16-17 years (old),” he said. “As the juveniles exited the bus, the shooting took place, which resulted in 6 people shot.

“At least 2 suspects are outstanding, at least six victims transported to the hospital.”

He added that police had already detained some of those suspected of involvement in the shooting.

The assault came after a gunman murdered four people Sunday at two religious centers in Colorado, before killing himself, and in a year that saw the worst ever US school shooting at Virginia Tech University, where a deranged student killed 32 people.

There is no mention of the shootings being related to schools and school safety in this news clip but it does make one wonder – is this occurrence something that should concern those who are working in the field of school safety?

The teenagers were aged 16 to 17 and were all from Mojave High School. The cause of the shooting? Reports say that it was about a girl. Apparently, there was a fight earlier within the school premises which was broken up by school police. This ended in some students being arrested. Sheriff Doug Gillespie says that he believes that the fight is linked to the shooting which occurred later in the day.

This statement does make the incident related to school safety. Yet how do we deal with something like this? Though the fight occurred with in school premises, the shooting was outside of the school. Is that something that school safety officials can deal with? More so, do they have to deal with it?

I honestly do not have a concrete answer except that I think the issue, once again, goes beyond securing our schools. I think that the solution to problems like this one lies in the upbringing of our children. If we rear them to be law abiding and respectful of others, shootings over a girl may be avoided. It may be symptomatic of seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses, but that is the only solution that I can come up with right now. What about you?

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