With all the coverage of the Mark Foley scandal, North Korea’s nuclear testing and the Cory Lidle airplane crash, the story of another school shooting has fallen through the cracks this week.

This time, it was a 13-year-old boy who walked into his middle school in Missouri wearing a mask and trench coat while toting an assault rifle. Fortunately, he was only able to fire one shot into the ceiling before his gun jammed and the principal escorted him out of the building.

The Missouri middle school incident marks the fourth case within three weeks in which someone was able to bring a firearm onto school property in the United States, and it should have people worried. Yesterday alone, a school in California and another in New Mexico were locked down for a possible bomb threat and an alleged assault by a man with a knife, respectively.

There’s no solid answer about how to prevent violence like this from happening in schools. Stricter gun control won’t stop the problem, nor will keeping kids away from video games like ‘Grand Theft Auto.’ If someone wants to attack a school badly enough, the hard truth of the matter is that they will find a way, even if it means attacking a one-room Amish schoolhouse.

But there are ways to help prevent these incidents from occurring without placing metal detectors and security guards at the doors of every school, and it starts with doing nothing.

Cable news has a bad habit of scaring people when tragedy strikes. Too many times we see the ‘it could happen to you’ or ‘looking out for your security’ stories following these events. All this accomplishes is worrying people about their own safety, and in cases like the recent school shootings, this can only provoke copycats. There’s nothing wrong with reporting the story, in fact it’s important that the public knows about it. But when the media employ scare tactics, it makes the situation potentially worse than it is. Ratings aren’t worth that much.

President Bush actually has the right idea when it comes to this issue. He said in a news conference on Wednesday that the responsibility falls on families and administrators more than anyone else. If students are showing signs of problems in school, then parents should be notified and take action. Schools won’t be safe until administrators take threats seriously and other students learn to speak up if they hear of a classmate planning an attack.

The latest string of shootings may make safety in schools look like a hopeless cause, but it’s what we learn from them that can help prevent them in the future.

Steven Kovach is a featured columnist for The Daily Orange, where his columns appear on Fridays. You can e-mail him at sjkovach@gmail.com.

Published on October 12, 2006 at 12:00 pm