Opinion: Strive to make our schools safe

The latest school shooting -- this time at a suburban high school near San Diego -- left two students dead and 13 others wounded. It also left us, once again, with more questions than answers. Suspect Andy Williams, a 15-year-old freshman described as a "nerd" by classmates, reportedly told friends and at least one adult, only days before the deadly rampage, that he intended to shoot up the school.

Now the obvious questions: What made him do it? How did he so easily get his hands on the .22-caliber pistol he is said to have calmly fired and reloaded? How could so many people have missed or dismissed the warning signs?

Answers are difficult to come by, but the nation cannot afford to give up in its search for ways to enhance the safety of America's schools without creating hysteria that could brand innocent kids, and without embracing mindless zero-tolerance policies whose first casualty always seems to be common-sense.

President Bush called Monday's shooting a "disgraceful act of cowardice" -- a strange way of describing the deadly act of a troubled teenager. But he said nothing about the easy access to guns in this country (even Democrats were curiously quiet on this issue). It's true that California's tough gun-control laws didn't prevent Williams from getting a handgun his father kept at their home. But Congress and the president cannot pretend that the proliferation of handguns (now estimated at 65-million and counting) and the ease with which those weapons find their way into the hands of unsuspecting children or troubled teens are not a major part of the problem. Three days after the California school shooting, a 14-year-old girl in a Roman Catholic school in rural Pennsylvania shot a 13-year-old classmate in the school cafeteria.

While the politicians offer little more than stale homilies about teaching children right from wrong, many local school districts have been coming up with safety precautions on their own. In Tampa Bay and elsewhere, many schools have adopted "early detection" procedures and set up hotlines for anonymous tips, with some success. But those tools help only if they are used. The classmates who say they overheard Williams' threat were concerned enough to pat him down the morning of the shooting, and the grown-up who heard about it was apparently worried enough to try -- unsuccessfully -- to call the teen's father. But no one alerted authorities. Williams assured them he was just joking. No one is clairvoyant, and sometimes dark humor is just that. But this latest shooting should underscore the importance of students and parents taking seriously threats they may overhear.

Parents who keep guns in the house are taking a huge risk. According to authorities, the handgun used Monday belonged to Williams' divorced father, with whom the boy lived, and was kept in a locked cabinet. That reasonable precaution, however, failed -- apparently because the son knew how to gain access. Parents who insist on keeping guns at home should redouble efforts to secure their weapons. No measure is foolproof. But parental responsibility is the first step of defense against another teen, with yet another gun taken from home, leaving us with the most nagging question of all: "Why?"

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