Patricia Murphy: Failing our students, one school shooting at a time

It was every parent’s nightmare — news Wednesday morning of a lockdown at Apalachee High School turned into reports of gunfire, then injuries, then deaths. As of Wednesday afternoon, four people at the Winder high school were reported dead, including students. Nine were injured, and, horrifically, the shooter was confirmed to be a 14-year-old boy. Now the rest of us are left wondering not just how this happened, but why our leaders refused to do more to keep it from happening in the first place.

The scenes outside of the high school were chaotic and heartbreaking. Dozens, maybe hundreds of emergency vehicles swarmed the scene — sheriff’s deputies, EMTs, firefighters and even county game wardens responded. With traffic blocked by police more than a mile away from the school, panicked parents and grandparents simply parked their cars on the side of the road and started walking or running to reach their children instead.

The mother of a 15-year-old boy told Channel 2 Action News that her son had texted her from his classroom, “Mom, they’re shooting.” She told him to pray, run or hide. “That could have been my son that lost his life today,” she said.

Another mother said she had already been considering home schooling her children because she feared for their safety at school. “Maybe now we will,” she said.

Channel 2′s Matt Johnson recounted talking to a female student who said she saw her teacher die. “I tried to save him, I tried to save him,” she said.

The stories were as horrific as they were inevitable. Without more being done to prevent school shootings in Georgia and beyond, it feels like we’re just waiting for the next one to happen and praying it’s not where we live.

We don’t truly know whether this terrible new normal for our kids is a result of the increasingly lax gun laws that our leaders keep passing or a lack of security in schools. Is it because of the rising levels of anxiety in teens or a failure to keep guns away from people having a serious mental health crisis? Is it all of those things together? Maybe. But lawmakers in the state are not looking deeper to find out.

That’s especially perplexing because it often seems like there is no issue too large or too small for the Georgia General Assembly to study and debate. Since I began covering the Legislature four years ago, I’ve seen lawmakers debate everything from voting laws to tax cuts; how to teach history and which statues belong on state Capitol grounds. I once sat through a hearing on whether to eliminate the rabies vaccine for pets (they kept it) and spent hours in hearings about changes to truck weights on local bridges.

If a topic is complex, or lawmakers don’t know exactly what a bill or law should look like, they often create a study committee to gather more information. This year, House study committees are reviewing credit card fees and excise taxes, consumer protections in the tree safety industry, and changes to laws for navigable streams. The state Senate, for its part, has study committees taking deep dives on prison safety, preserving farmland, firearm storage (after failing to pass a bill on the topic) and caregiver services.

But since I have been covering the Legislature, there has never been a study committee to look at how to comprehensively address school shootings and, if I can make an easy prediction, at this rate there never will be.

That’s because a study committee would surely tell GOP leaders something they don’t want to hear — that along with the millions of dollars they already spent to upgrade security at schools and the requirements they put in place for active shooter drills for all students (including kindergartners), the only way to prevent school shootings is to also consider gun restrictions in some form or fashion.

Lawmakers have proved themselves acutely aware of other potential harms to children in schools and have been ready to act accordingly.

When conservatives feared that some white children could be made to feel sad or guilty depending on how a teacher presented a topic such as slavery, the House and Senate passed a bill that detailed which topics teachers could introduce and even specified the kinds of questions they were allowed to answer.

When a transgender college student in Pennsylvania swam in a women’s swim meet, GOP lawmakers moved to ban all transgender kids from participating on Georgia school teams different from their gender at birth. Last week, a new Senate study committee held a public hearing to find out what more should be done on that issue.

But when four people were killed in a Barrow County school on Wednesday by a boy from their own community, the most leaders could offer were thoughts and prayers.

Speaking for myself, I am thinking and praying deeply for the children and families affected. I am also profoundly grateful to the school resource officer who stopped the shooter and certainly prevented more carnage in the process.

But I know we would not need so many thoughts and prayers if lawmakers would take action and do more to save our students’ lives, no matter the politics.

As of now, they’re just failing them, one school shooting at a time.