Insoluble

It was a recognizable, if rote, reaction to an event that has become almost mundane in America: students and teachers gunned down in their schools—places where they are supposed to be safe.
In Armed America, CEOs Get Protection. Schoolkids Get 'Thoughts and Prayers'

This idea, that schools are places where students and teachers are supposed to be safe, is a new one. It's become commonplace in stories about school shootings. The shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado was little over 25 years ago, and in the intervening time there have been about 500 incidents of shooting in schools. The exact number; as always in these things, depends on whom one asks, and how they count.

By 1999, I'd left my "past life" as a youth and child care worker in the Chicago area behind. But even before the, the idea that predominantly Black schools were "supposed to be safe" had faded into memory. Armed officers and metal detectors were par for the course in the mid 1990s, according to the people I worked with. Violence was simply accepted.

The United States doesn't tend to see things that don't impact the "mainstream" of society (generally the middle and lower ends of the upper class) as problems. That's part of the reason why Columbine was such a big event. It was violence in a place that shouldn't have had any. Not because Columbine High School was a school, but because Columbine was an outlying part of the Denver metropolitan area; far from the "inner city" and the drug and gang problems that people believed were confined to it, yet not so far as for the people to be "rednecks."

Newsweek's accusatory headline states that "Schoolkids Get 'Thoughts and Prayers'," but even that isn't a given, because shootings in poor and blighted urban areas aren't considered to be a problem of American gun culture, but of the criminality and vices of the people who live in those neighborhoods. I suspect that it, like so many other things, is about a sense of control, and of uprightness. But it creates a dividing line between people, when they segregate themselves based on the idea that their choices should somehow insulate them from the violence inherent in a society that commonly views violence as a go-to solution to problems.

The problem with thoughts and prayers is that they have come to be seen as an admission of helplessness; a way of public officials to say that a solution is out of their hands, without having to openly admit to same. And that may be why they aren't so openly offered in schools where violence is a regular occurrence; the idea that the problem isn't at all theirs to solve.