Kids in Barrow County, Georgia, went back to school today, which means it’s officially been almost two years since Colt Gray walked into Apalachee High School with a rifle his father never bothered to lock up.

WSB-TV out of Atlanta ran a piece marking the occasion, one day after Colin Gray got sentenced to 15 years for the part he played in all of it. The timing wasn’t subtle. Neither, honestly, was the headline of “Nearly two years after Apalachee school shooting, here’s how school safety changed.”

Deputy Superintendent Matt Thompson walked WSB through the changes, such as new weapon detection tech, schools mapped out so first responders know the layout before they ever set foot inside, and the school district’s goal of an SRO in every school.

Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith wants you to know these aren’t just armed guards standing in hallways, either. They eat lunch with the kids. They get invited to school events. “They are family to them as well,” he told WSB.

Unfortunately, the research on SROs is not on their side. Studies show that putting more police in schools shows no detectable improvement to school crime or violence. Another federally funded study that specifically tracked schools that added SROs had the exact same results and also found those schools saw a rise in exclusionary discipline. This means more kids getting suspended and expelled and not fewer kids getting shot.

Even the more favorable research on this only ever finds effects on things like fights and confiscated weapons, never on the thing everyone actually cares about, which is whether a kid brings a rifle to school and starts pulling the trigger. So Barrow County is about to have one armed officer in every single building in the county, and the honest answer to will this stop the next Colt Gray is probably not. But hey, it’ll sure look good on a press release.

Georgia also passed a law requiring schools to install panic-button systems so a teacher can flag an emergency with the press of a button. The same law throws some money at identifying and helping kids with mental health issues. Thompson called it “a comprehensive approach to safety,” which is generous phrasing for a bill that mostly speeds up how fast a school can react once someone’s already firing rounds in the building.

Every single change in that article, the wands, the maps, the SROs, and the button, happens after the gun is already in the building. Not one of them stops the gun from getting there in the first place. That’s what’s known as security theater.

Do you know what didn’t change? Gun laws.

Colt Gray was diagnosed as struggling and being obsessed with mass shooters. He had already been questioned by deputies over an online threat, and his father’s response was to buy him a gun for Christmas.

Mentally ill? Here’s a gun.

Only fourteen? Here’s a gun.

Your dad can’t be bothered to lock his guns up? Here’s more fucking guns.

That’s not a metaphor; that’s the actual sequence of events that got four people killed in Apalachee High, and Georgia’s legislative response to it was a button a teacher can press after the shooting has already started.

While they’ve addressed mental health, it’s still being treated like an afterthought in this country. Kids like Colt Gray need real care instead of a pamphlet nobody reads. But mental illness didn’t kill Mason Schermerhorn, or Christian Angulo, or Ricky Aspinwall, or Cristina Irimie. A gun did that. It got into the hands of an unraveling fourteen-year-old because a supposed adult decided that was fine, and no amount of SROs eating lunch with kids is going to undo the fact that this country treats gun access as sacred while it treats mental healthcare access as a luxury.

The families of the people who died get the last word in the WSB piece, and they already know everything I just told you. They said they want continued investment in safety measures, sure, but what they specifically asked for was laws to keep firearms out of schools.

They get it, in a way that Georgia’s legislature apparently still doesn’t, or doesn’t want to. You can’t have a school shooting if there’s nothing to shoot with.

Everything else in that article is just rearranging furniture in a house that somebody keeps setting on fire.

(Source)

• Nearly two years after Apalachee school shooting, here’s how school safety changed