Recent editorials from Alabama newspapers:
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May 21
Opelika-Auburn News tells readers what to do if they’re tired of hearing about school shootings:
The complacency with stories about school shootings may sadly make the headlines seem less noticeable now, but school officials are right to realize there is no place for such ignorance in organizing, planning and certainly funding their safety needs for students and staff.
No longer can increased access to school resource officers be something considered a luxury or added benefit instead of a necessity as important as teachers and classrooms.
Drills to train students and faculty on how to stay alive in active-shooter attacks are becoming as common and routine as honor assemblies and keynote guest speakers meant to enlighten and inspire.
Now, new construction and building design has control of entry points and exits in mind more so than inviting plazas and recreational patios.
The latest school-shooting report may be tiring to news consumers who might shed a tear or simply a shrug before flipping the page or fast-forwarding to the next story, but to school boards, schoolhouse designers and to teachers looking closer at the door locks and barricade materials available in their classrooms, it commands attention as much as any monster tornado or some other evil trying to strike at the innocence and good of education.
Politicians wallow in sympathy and empathy, but not action. They avoid the gun debate like a rattlesnake, but then fail to provide the protection or clear the pathway to avoid the venomous bite.
The Second Amendment debate and what is or isn’t a threat to gun ownership isn’t the only one in which lawmakers should be engaged. It, right or wrong, is going nowhere and accomplishing nothing.
However, it is past time for Congress and state legislatures to join the conversation on how to fund and prepare what more likely can be done.
Most school districts cannot afford on their own a school resource officer for every school. How are we addressing that?
School defenses could include more camera-security systems, high-tech door-lock systems, and who knows how many other modern ways and tools to defend against or even trap a renegade shooter.
And then there are the counseling and mental health needs. Are we helping school counselors, teachers and administrators enough with training and support to better identify and approach students with the most serious emotional and scarred personalities?
If teachers already have enough to do with educating and motivating their students, and providing them personal attention and care, then how best should we help protect our teachers other than telling them to better diagnose mental aptitudes and start carrying a gun?
We can shrug and flip the page on yet another school-shooter story again, and again, and again, and again.
Or, we can move the conversation into the arenas that deserve to be where we next take the fight.
Gun safety and responsibility is most certainly a part of that fight, but it is far from being the limits to it.
It’s time we as a community - and as a nation - realize that, and become the aggressors.
It’s our turn to fight back.
Now.
Online: http://www.oanow.com
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May 21
Dothan Eagle says careless shootings are as deadly as intended shootings:
There has been a lot of national dialogue about guns ever since the mass shooting at Columbine High School almost 20 years ago. With the most recent of these unfolding just last week in Santa Fe, Texas, there is a renewed call for measures - any measures - to address the growing trend of mass shootings, whether in the schoolhouse or in any crowded place.
These loud and rancorous debates have become more political than sociological, and there is no solution in sight.
However, lost in the noise over gun rights and gun control is an important matter that should be addressed ever day wherever firearms are available - the proper and safe procedures for handling weapons.
At the weekend party in Dothan, an incident with a shotgun apparently thought to be unloaded created untold tragedy, leaving one young man dead, another in jail, and countless others changed forever by the unthinkable events of the evening.
The incident should serve as an impetus for gun safety, starting with how to safely store firearms and continuing with instruction in respect for weapons, proper handling, and, most important, the wisdom of never pointing a weapon, loaded or not, at a person - particularly one you have no intent to harm.
Online: http://www.dothaneagle.com
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May 21
The Gadsden Times says President Donald Trump’s White House has been bedeviled by leaks:
More than once, we’ve cited a particular problem for President Donald Trump and much of his staff: They came into the White House basically clueless about how it works.
We’ll absolutely concede that was a selling point to his most devoted supporters who don’t want business as usual. They see the White House and pretty much every other governmental building in Washington, D.C., solely as swampland to be drained.
Unfortunately, some of that muck is about as resistant to drainage as the average 6-year-old is to getting in bed early on a school night.
Take the leaking of information to the media, for example, something practitioners of our trade have much institutional knowledge of (and benefit often from).
People simply like to talk. No matter how much they might protest otherwise, it defies human nature for them to keep quiet when they “know something.”
People in Washington REALLY like to talk, and when they “know something” will go significantly out of their way to find receptive ears to share it with. Some think the media hounds folks into leaking information. Trust us, more often it takes relatively little exertion.
At their core, many people in Washington also are free agents out for themselves and quite willing to share what they “know,” even if they carry the label of the party in power or work for a specific administration.
That’s how the tale of a wisecrack about Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, made it into the media, sending Trump and his key staff into paroxysms of fury alternating with vows of head-rolling retribution.
A White House staffer, during discussions about Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel (who subsequently was confirmed and has been sworn in), dismissed McCain’s call for her to be rejected by saying, “He’s dying anyway.”
That he is, of brain cancer. It still was an indefensible and reprehensible remark about an American hero whose body bears the scars of wartime captivity. When something like that happens, you offer a mea culpa, take the hit and move on.
However, Trump and his staff continue to rage more about the leak than the snafu. How do we know this? Well, the Associated Press, in the story we used, quoted “a White House official and an outside Trump adviser,” neither of whom “was authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.”
Translation: A couple of leakers talked to the AP. So perhaps some folks in the Trump administration do understand this is a game to be played, that can either benefit them or bite them in very unpleasant places.
This is far from a new problem. (Remember why President Richard Nixon gave his administration’s covert White House intelligence team the nickname “Plumbers?”) It’s just a more acute issue in the chaotic, infighting-ridden Trump White House.
Again, we accept that people voted for Trump to stir things up in Washington, and that many of his supporters are fine with a little creative chaos as long as they get what they want when the rubble settles.
They, the president and his staff just need to understand that tongues are going to be loosened even more by that chaos, and assume that every word spoken inside the White House will at some point be eternally preserved in cyberspace.
That certainly isn’t optimum, but it definitely is reality.
Online: http://www.gadsdentimes.com
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