And, to add onto that, should the police be arresting kids?
It depends if they committed an offense the merits arrest. I would hope you agree that if kid enters school with a gun with the intent to shoot other kids that it merits arrest.
Of course, I’m more worried about minor infractions. Here’s a relevant excerpt from the aforementioned article.
Putting more people with guns in schools is not the answer. By increasing police presence in school, we are guaranteeing that more students will be arrested – perhaps unnecessarily. Increasing police in schools will contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. According to the ACLU(pdf):
“In practice, most school police spend a significant portion of their time responding to minor, nonviolent infractions – children who have drawn on desks or talked back to teachers, for example – rather than behaviors that seriously threaten school safety.”
Minor issues such as these that used to be dealt with by school officials are now being dealt with by police officers who will arrest students for such minor misbehavior. Students who bring weapons to school or who commit violent crimes on school grounds should be arrested, of course, but not those who write on desks or talk back to teachers. One arrest dramatically decreases the likelihood that a student will graduate from high school, and can create a host of other issues down the line.
Regulation. Name any regulation, and that’s another option beyond just banning guns or having armed guards.
What regulation? like I said, banning guns isn’t going to happen. So what regulation would you suggest?
I’m not an expert on the issue, but some things that sound good to me on a surface level are; raising the minimum age to 21, a ban on high-capacity magazines, more extensive background checks on a national level, and maybe a mental health examination but it may have the potential to be problematic.