Correspondence
Correspondence COLUMBINE, COPS, & KIDS AS A VETERAN HIGH-SCHOOL TEACHER in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I find little to disagree with in David B. Kopel's article "What If We Had Taken...
...It requires more disciplined behavior than the street and a mite less reserve than church...
...It is often wrongly assumed that adults know how to behave around children...
...Correspondence COLUMBINE, COPS, & KIDS AS A VETERAN HIGH-SCHOOL TEACHER in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I find little to disagree with in David B. Kopel's article "What If We Had Taken Columbine Seriously...
...According to a National Public Radio commentary on April 21, the risk that a child will be killed while attending school is about 1 in 2,000,000...
...ROB DAKIN Athens, OH...
...DAN HART La Crescenta, CA THE FIRST TIME I SAW video of the events at Columbine, I was struck by, and amazed at, the cowardice of the police...
...We couldn't manufacture a more inviting environment for kids to hate each other if we tried...
...The greatest risk to children is presented by the community itself, not the schools...
...Yet the number of children who are homicide victims equals "a Columbine every two days...
...We must all be grateful that the other cowards, the two student gunmen, didn't see this opportunity for target practice...
...The police should have minimized this tragedy...
...Any argument that uses Columbine as the basis for sweeping change in national gun policy is completely without merit, and probably as self-serving as those criticized by the author...
...prohibit profanity and inappropriate demonstrations of affection...
...Thank you for having the guts to focus on this issue...
...This is what we should do: Provide explicit instruction on the basic tenets of good behavior, citizenship, and character...
...Teachers should dress better, too...
...and provide all students a rigorous physical education class that will work out some of that adolescent angst...
...April 24/May 1...
...School is no longer a special place...
...Adults made the rules and sometimes we chafed at them...
...According to the NPR report, school remains the safest place a child can be, far safer than the streets, the workplace, or, unfortunately, the home...
...require school uniforms or very strict dress codes...
...As a profession, we need behavior and ethics codes...
...Instead they exacerbated the danger and very likely maximized the death toll...
...In the year 2000, we have abrogated the responsibility to teach our students to be good people...
...The article concludes with the assertion that if other killers are out there, "your children and mine are just as much at risk as they were the day before Columbine...
...In short, it is up to adults to make sure high-school students understand that school is different...
...But while David B. Kopel provided a nice outline of the either/or dialogue he feels should have taken place, he ignored a larger and far more important point...
...it's just another place...
...However, other solutions which might prevent more Columbines have been ignored, replaced by a singular focus on guns...
...And if you don't believe me, have your teenager read this letter...
...Kopel's article adds to the misconception that school is unsafe...
...TIM HOLMAN Iowa City, IA THE SAME "OFFICER SAFETY" mentality David B. Kopel cites as the reason for the magnitude of the Columbine shooting was responsible for Amadou Diallo's grotesque death in New York city—a death that has routinely been described as unfortunate but unavoidable in conservative publications...
...When I graduated high school in 1969 (a watershed year in many respects), students were more likely to be upset with adults than their classmates...
...We need the type of debate Kopel calls for, but let's put Columbine and other school shootings in their proper perspective as isolated, tragic events...
...We can only hope that other police agencies around the nation have studied the performance of their brother officers in Littleton and learned what doesn't work...
...We allow (indeed, encourage) teens to separate themselves by race, possessions, dress, and tastes...
...They treated fleeing students like prisoners, maximizing the danger to the students by insisting that they place their hands behind their heads before running out into the open, creating a potential shooting gallery with human targets and delaying the students' escape...
...I expressed my contempt to others at the time, but few saw my concern...
...S. L. CHAMBERS Houston, TX I CERTAINLY AGREE the national debate following Columbine has been at best misguided and at worst motivated by political self-interest...
...By advancing the opinion that prevention of school shootings should have served as the basis for a meaningful national debate on gun policy, Mr...
...give teachers more power to move problem or disinterested students to alternative sites permanently...
Vol. 5 • May 2000 • No. 33
