Another Day, Another School Shooting

A week ago in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a shooting occurred at Watson Chapel Junior High School. The school had been closed for several weeks due to bad weather conditions and the first day it reopened, a 15-year old boy walked up to another 15-year old and shot him right outside one of the classrooms. The shooter was caught and sent to jail. The victim was rushed to the hospital and died two days later.

We must take much greater precautions to stop this sort of thing from happening. We need gun control and more restrictions because right now, it’s far too easy to obtain a gun. We also need threat assessment teams to evaluate potential threats and decide who is dangerous. With schools reopening from pandemic shutdowns, shootings are expected to rise again. To try to prevent this, parents need to do a better job at talking to their children. They need to sit down and really converse with their kids to find out what’s truly going on in their lives. It’s important to know what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, what school is like for them, what kinds of friends they have, and if they’re falling into the wrong crowd or hanging around dangerous people. Parents need to be much more involved in their children’s lives and the lines of communication need to be kept open. Additionally, teachers need to take action and make it clear to their students that violence is not the answer. Finally, we need to have emotional skills training in schools. Violent shootings destroy society and our faith in the future. How can you send your child to school every day knowing they might get shot? If I was a parent in Pine Bluff, I would be extremely scared to send my child back where a shooting had just occurred. That kind of fear strikes at the very heart of society. I think school shootings and mass shootings are the greatest dangers our nation faces. To combat this, we need a multitude of things, including gun control, threat assessment teams, better communication between parents and children, and emotional skills classes. We need to start organizing this now so that violence can be stopped. These things are the beginning actions to a solution and we should be working on this as quickly as we can because no mother should have to bury her 15-year-old child.