With a vexing social problem, perspective is helpful.

Some years ago, North Carolina’s Governor’s Crime Commission conducted a survey, the NC Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which produced these findings:

  • Ninth-grade males carrying weapons (gun, knife or club) increased from 36 to 49 percent;
  • Males carrying guns in the month prior to the survey increased from 9 to 20 percent for ninth-grade males and from 9 to 23 percent for twelfth-grade males.
  • A significant percentage of students:
    • don’t feel safe at school
    • stayed home from school one or more days in the month prior to the survey
    • reported being threatened or injured by a weapon on school property
    • had personal property stolen or deliberately damaged on school property.

These were statewide stats, so this is not an issue of a tough neighborhood or a single troubled school district. All of this was before the Columbine and Sandy Hook (Newtown) shootings. It was 1993. The Governor was Jim Hunt and my own kids were in elementary and middle school in the Orange County district.

There were incidents at Orange High School. Lots of them. Then-principal and the Orange County Commissioners Vice-Chair Steve Halkiotis was instrumental in the district assembling a community-based task force to deal with this issue.

Although I was not appointed to the task force, I was invited to attend some meetings. We talked about the specific issues facing educators — the conflict between students’ right to privacy and community accountability for criminal acts that were happening at school. There was trespassing on a regular basis. There was gang activity and far too many assaults. Halkiotis had been assaulted by a student in one such incident and suffered a broken nose for his effort to break up a fight. He knew (as we all did) it could have been worse. So much worse.

I wrote a grant proposal for the creation of the County’s Community Resource Officer program. This would expand and fund (for two years) what Sheriff Pendergrass was already doing: putting deputies at Orange High School during the lunch hour when things between and among teenagers can tend to heat up.

I would describe this program’s track record over the last 17 years as successful, but it is by its nature far downstream for the underlying problem that we have seen play out in some extreme cases in those years.

Teenage boys having access to deadly weapons is beyond risky. It’s reckless. It cannot be justified.

We need to face some facts here. First – this is very nearly 100% a problem of teenage boys. This is just a statistical fact. Second – what we’re doing as a society to address the underlying issue obviously, tragically NOT WORKING. The underlying problem is clear – teenagers should not have unfettered access to deadly force. There is a mountain of science to tell us that the executive function in an emerging teenage brain is simply not ready to block out and manage the emotional impulses that sometimes flood the brain.

I’m not saying “it’s not his fault.” I am saying “don’t give him a gun.”

To be clear, I’m not talking about a 19-year-old Marine with a highly structured life, training and a chain of command. I’m talking about a 15-year-old whose parents bought him a gun at a Black Friday sale.

It has been 28 years since Governor Hunt created the NC Center for the Prevention of School Violence. The Center is now named the NC Center for Safer Schools.

I’m sure that everyone felt this renaming focused better on the positive, preventive aspects of the Center’s work. What they do is important. The Center is a clearinghouse of data and valuable resources. They provide training for school officials and millions annually in funding to help parents and schools deal with these problems.

I haven’t read every single thing on the Center’s website (click here and see for yourself) but I can find nothing on there advocating for gun control or examining gun violence as a public health emergency.

Candidates in the upcoming election cycle need to have their positions ready for questions about this. Except for COVID, we face no greater threat to our safety and security.

Click here for more on the NC Center for Safer Schools

Photo via the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.

jean bolducJean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.

Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc

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