For Fall Break, I went back to my hometown of Fort Wayne for a couple of days to see my family and friends. One of the people I talked extensively with was my roommate's sister, who is currently a freshman at my alma mater, North Side High School.
I expected her experience to be similar to mine, and for the most part it is. North Side is a typical inner-city school; she is struggling to ignore the distractions in her classes due to the vast amount of second and third year freshmen and has to fight to keep her place in the lunch lines, but she is making friends and generally having a good time.
While listening to her talk about it, one thing caught me off guard. She said, "I know that kids bring guns to school and all, but it's crazy how many of them are in my classes."
Now, maybe the safe environment I have grown accustomed to in college has spoiled me, but this really scared me. Thinking about the kinds of people that went to my school, it would probably be na've to think that this kind of thing did not happen when I went to North Side, but never once could I say with any certainty those who were or were not armed.
I understand that the administration probably has a lot more things to take care of than protecting our adolescent friends and family members from guns, but what could be more important than that? Apparently making sure our kids stay away from such dangerous sites as Myspace, Facebook and ebaumsworld.com.
I guess social networking is more dangerous than we all thought.
It is probably the increasing number of recent school shootings talking, but it seems like many of our schools are more interested in making their lives easier than actually tackling something that could make a difference in students' actual safety.
Administrators have the ability to ban content they deem offensive and potentially revealing from school publications because it might get them into trouble with parents. They can demand to inspect students' property and lockers without reasonable cause, and can even search a student's blog and punish them for the content.
It is not that schools condone students carrying guns, but the fact that they do nothing more to stop them besides simply saying they cannot. They take an active position against Facebook and other social networking sites by setting up Web blocks, but it seems to be too difficult to make safety a priority.
If they have all this power, why can't they ensure parents that these same kids will not die in a shooting by some student who just broke up with his girlfriend?
As for you National Rifle Association-ers, the schools are already infringing upon many of the students' Constitutional rights, so why should the Second Amendment be immune? Is it really more important for high school students to have the right to carry their glocks instead of learning the benefits and responsibilities of a free press?
As for my friend's sister, she will probably be just fine. In the almost 80-year history of North Side I do not think there has ever been an instance of one student killing another while school was in session, so thank goodness they are controlling the real threat: social networking.
We all know that guns don't kill people, Myspace does.
Christian Robinson is a junior telecommunications major and writes 'Overshare!' for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper.
Write to Christian at cmrobinson@bsu.edu
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