The picture emerging from the school shooting in Pennsylvania Dutch Country evokes more than our horror at its monstrous nature. It evokes fear.
A profoundly disturbed gunman went into a rural Amish school looking for girls to sexually molest and kill. The similarities to the Bailey tragedy of last week seem too many to be coincidence.
This time, five girls died, shot execution- style by Charles Carl Roberts IV. Authorities said he intended to sexually assault the girls, as he had molested two young relatives 20 years ago. As police closed in, he opened fire, killing the girls and himself. It was a terrifying replay of Emily Keyes’ death at the hands of a murderous maniac in Bailey.
The pathology of such a twisted mind is difficult to comprehend, but we must try in order to forestall any more copycats.
It is time to take immediate precautions. Local school administrators must review and reconsider their security precautions and emergency manuals. If there is need for safety spending and no available funding, the federal government ought to help.
Between 1999, the year of the Columbine massacre, and 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice provided $732 million for 6,420 school police officers.
But the funding has dried up, said Gilbert Moore, a department spokesman. There was no money in the 2006 federal budget for officers in schools, and there are no centrally kept statistics about whether local governments have been able to pick up the tab, Moore said. But anecdotal reports are that the security ranks have been reduced.
Of course, having a police officer assigned to a school is no panacea. Platte Canyon High School in Bailey had an assigned school resource officer who was at a nearby substation working on another matter when the violence erupted.
The Bush administration plans to host a conference next week on school violence. It’s a welcome step, and we hope the session contributes real solutions to the sudden series of violent incidents in schools.
We need to make sure we can protect our students and teachers, and that may require a new approach to school safety. While none of us want schools to become armed outposts, as a nation we cannot tolerate them being easy targets, either.
