Commentary: Preventing the next school shooting depends on vigilance, not gizmos

On Feb. 14, a gunman on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., killed 17 students and staff members and injured 17 others.

In response, the school hired safety experts to help determine ways to avoid another attack. Among the recommendations of the experts was to mandate that all backpacks have a clear back to enable contents to be in plain view.

In no time, many students decided that their privacy was more important than this safety measure and they found workarounds to hide the contents of their backpacks. The cat-and-mouse game continued recently when the experts decided that any backpack was acceptable but that students would have to pass through metal detectors to get into the school, according to the Orlando Sun-Sentinel.

Metal detectors won’t help. Nor will the enhanced fencing, the new I.D. cards that must be worn on a lanyard, the 52 additional cameras they have installed or any of the other false sense-of-security props being implemented.

The next school shooter at any middle or high school will be a student at the school. That’s as true here in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District as it is in Florida. The student will plan the attack and even drop hints that it’s coming. Those are real profile items that have been repeated in attacks across the country.

At the NMUSD school board meeting on June 26, attendees were given a “School and Workplace Safety” presentation that included many of the recommendations being considered at Parkland. There wasn’t a single word about profiling potential attackers.

The experts in the district can mandate all the badges they want or start fingerprinting guests or conduct retina scans.

Have at it. The truth is that if anyone is going to shoot up a school it is quite likely to be someone who has a perfect right to be there and will go about his or her business completely under the radar.

This whole idea of an intruder hopping a security fence with two AK-47s under a trench coat is going the way of the fax machine.

In order to reduce or stop attacks, school officials need to move upstream and stop the attackers before they start. Their typical profiles are documented and well-known, apparently to everyone except the folks in the district, who seem to want to spend precious education resources on tangible, feel-good security items instead of developing a rigorous troubled teen identification program that will be far more effective.

The key to stopping the next shooter lies not in more gizmos, but more vigilance. But the absence of any psychological component to the district’s safety proposals underscores the need for new trustees and new ways of thinking in this election year.

Costa Mesa resident Steve Smith is a former Daily Pilot columnist.