San Bernardino School Shooting Leaves 3 Dead, Including Student - Emma Reyna

Summary/Synthesis:


Two years after a terrorist attack killing 14 people, San Bernardino has been hit again with an elementary school shooting which left three people dead. The shooter was the husband of the special needs teacher at North Park Elementary School. The couple had been separated for the last month and the man had a criminal record including domestic violence, weapons possession and drug possession.  This connects to just about every past shooting in modern day America, whether it be at a school or anywhere. What it seems like to me is that the killers always slip under the radar of the authorities, even though they usually have some violent condition or past criminal record which makes them dangerous to others. This is a terrible act, especially since it seems so close to home, and it makes me think about how this could happen literally any day, anywhere, even at Booker T.  which is a sad reality to live in.

Anaylsis:

 I believe that in order to prevent incidents like this, we need a more comprehensive system to do background checks on people before they are allowed to obtain guns. In addition i    also believe that this man should not have been allowed to obtain a gun, due to his history in weapon and drug possession and domestic abuse. And I  feel the best way to counter these kind of threats is to increase the accessibility of mental health services, and create policy designed to make sure people who are at risk to commit such kinds of violent acts do not fall through the cracks.  A lot of these people would not be dangerous if they had access to proper medical treatment. The stigma surrounding mental illness, and the lack of proper facilities in many places leads to inadequate care. Most of the time this only hurts the people directly effected by mental illness, but in some cases it can expand-like it did in this case. We are better off treating the cause of these disasters rather than just the symptoms. That said there should still be reasonable protection at schools-solid doors and windows, and drills to instruct students and teachers what to do in case of an emergency.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/us/san-bernardino-school-shooting.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0