Editorial: Changing attitudes key to solving school shootings

Everyone agrees: Someone should do something to prevent the next school shooting tragedy.

The answer is far more complicated than making it more difficult for people to get guns, though. Obviously criminalizing school shootings must not be that effective, given that it’s already illegal to kill people in numbers large or small, yet people still do it.

The answer isn’t removing every gun that looks frightening. The Second Amendment is too foundational in our freedoms for that. The answers are so much more complicated than that.

No, we must adjust the conversation entirely. We must change the conversation from addressing school shootings to adjusting our nation’s violent culture that refuses to step out and help someone.

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We should recognize efforts to protect our children, such as football coach and security guard Aaron Feis, who jumped in front of the shooter to shield the students. We should recognize the Buckeye Firearms Association’s FASTER Saves Lives program, which gives educators intensive violence response and trauma first aid training at no cost to the school district. We welcome some local district’s openness to discussing properly trained educators having firearms in their classrooms to help protect their students.

This is a complicated problem that will take money and changing attitudes to solve. The country didn’t devolve into this state overnight, nor should it expect to crawl back from it overnight.

When we think about who should prevent the next school shooting tragedy, the answer is all of us.

Click here to read the entire op-ed at LimaOhio.com