Photo illustration by HARMONY REILLY

If you’re anything like me, there are some moments when you wish school could just disappear. You wouldn’t mind. As if seven hours of school isn’t enough, you then have to go home and spend hours on homework that can’t be completed without the help of the notes that seem to be written in some sort of foreign language.

There will always be something about school that we don’t like. Students will always find a way to complain about something, even if it’s something as trivial as reading a few pages from a book, or studying for a test. If there’s something us students are good at, it’s complaining. However, complaining about going to school is a luxury; sometimes we don’t appreciate what we have. School is something we see as a nuisance, but we haven’t ever had genuine fear of having a gunman break in and shoot our friends.

On December 14th, a madman with a gun walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and mercilessly shot down 20 children and 6 adults. Those children won’t experience the stress and drama of middle school, or the late nights of high school spent desperately trying to finish an assignment on time.

They were looking forward to the holidays and the presents underneath their trees. They were just days away from Christmas, which usually brings feelings of joy and happiness, but instead will now bring on hurt and relentless sorrow for the families who lost children.  Twenty children took their last breath, decades too soon. Twenty children won’t live to get married and have little ones of their own. Twenty children won’t have their first kiss, their first jobs or their first love. Those children had their entire lives ahead of them. They had dreams to be princesses, astronauts, or veterinarians. But their lives were taken, years early. And now they’re gone, leaving a trail of agony and anguish in their wake.

How any person, whether they were mentally stable or not, could bear to point a gun in the face of an innocent child is beyond me. How he could squeeze the trigger and end the life of a child not old enough to understand the evil that lives in this world is unjustifiable.

This begs the question of possible solutions to this problem. How do we prevent something like this from happening again? Do we arm all our teachers with guns?

No. Guns are not the solution to this problem. If we were to bring more guns into the school, who’s to say a student wouldn’t steal a teacher’s gun and shoot everyone in the class anyway? The more guns that are added to a higher quantity of people leads to more uncertainty and danger.

Fighting fire with fire does nothing but help progress the flame into a blazing inferno. If someone wishes to harm other people, he will find a way, whether or not he has a gun, and regardless if he knows the people he is up against have guns as well.

In order to ensure the safety in school, we don’t need to bring automatic rifles to class, or knives, or any other sort of weapon. Those things will just add to the turmoil, and school is something that needs to have less chaos, not more of it.

 We should make sure that only authorized personnel can enter a classroom. We should have a better plan of escape and have more protection in case a terrible situation like this were to happen again.

The doors to our classrooms are, essentially, the doors to our lives. If someone can enter a classroom with a gun and shoot numerous people in a matter of minutes, and all they had to do was turn the handle, then that’s a weakness we shouldn’t let go unnoticed. We should make sure that the doors to all classrooms cannot open without a code, or a key, all the time. We’re already halfway there, but the doors can still open without a teacher’s key at times, which almost defeats the purpose of having doors that require a magnetic key at all. The doors should be able to open, and then once they close, they should stay closed unless someone opens it from the inside or uses a key. This way, not only will students be more protected, but it will deter people with bad intentions from trying to wreak havoc at our schools, if they know they can’t get in a simple door.

We should take better safety precautions with our schools, so we don’t end up like the children in Connecticut did — with shattered dreams and leaving an open wound that won’t heal for many years.

by HARMONY REILLY