Monday, June 16, 2025
-Bill Crane-
It was the morning of September 4, 2024, Georgia’s deadliest school shooting was underway in Winder, Georgia at Apalachee High School. Thanks to a recently upgraded school security system, a fast-acting school resource officer and local law enforcement, the mass murder was halted at four fatalities, with serious injuries to nine others. My first born was (and is) a schoolteacher living nearby. The Apalachee River, which serves as a border between Barrow and Walton counties as well as the school campus are each just a few miles away.
Our children will never be enveloped in the security of a member of the First Family, but there are steps which can be taken and are being taken, to improve and strengthen their safety. I was frozen in time for moments as I heard news of the shooting. My daughter and her mother are both career educators, my younger child, also in a DeKalb County public school, has come to accept school shooter drills as part of her new normal. I may never understand or forgive the shooter, teenager Colt Gray, or reduce my disdain for the judgment of a father who reportedly gifted a 14-year old a semi-automatic firearm. All that said, I don’t blame the gun.
Across our nation, in the thousands, if not millions, our young men are broken, and I will come back to that. But we know from long operating military bases, protecting heads of state and even enhanced corporate security since 9/11, if we harden and better secure targets…we greatly increase their safety and security, while simultaneously decreasing the success chances of a random or planned act of violence.
I want to recognize and thank Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Lt. Governor Burt Jones, House Speaker Jon Burns and the members of both legislative chambers who overwhelmingly supported a nearly half-a-billion investment in improved school and campus security. Smaller efforts have already been made, and enhancements completed, most in two categories, hiring or placing School Resource Officers or creating a locked/secured central entrance point with metal detectors and camera systems. Yet though this should seem obvious to most anyone, bad guys generally don’t walk in the front door or stand in front of security cameras. As long as there are side entrances, loading docks, doors propped by students tired of pushing a buzzer to re-enter their own school, etc…an easy path remains for bad actors.
While I don’t relish that our children are being taught how to run, secure themselves and be quiet to avoid shooter attention, I know from speaking with other shooting survivors that those tactics WORK. We have seen technological advances in security cameras, in terms of imagery as well as the more modern inclusion of sound. Every school system in the state should be investing in networked, monitored camera systems at every school building entrance and exit, as well as hallways and larger common spaces.
Our Governor and General Assembly made dual investments, serious funding to harden school targets and improve security systems, and another significant investment in mental health for adding school counselors to assist in identifying and treating mental health symptoms and challenges before they become severe and within our schools.
Most of this debate, for the past several decades, has focused on the gun safety/gun control side of the geometrically expanding tragedy. The average male tween and teen have consumed thousands of hours of violent video gaming, movies and even porn content intended for more mature audiences. The internet is filled with dark and cult cultures that seem to reward manifestos of anger at the world with recognition and even some strange sense of belonging.
For most young men I encounter in high school and college, eye contact, handshakes and even the normal social interactions of daily life seem quite foreign. This has concerned me for more than a decade, and while I mentor and even take away phones or tablets on occasion, our society and greater community need to be stepping in more here as well. We can turn our schools into Fort Knox, at considerable expense of limited resources, or we can make sensible security enhancements while working to reduce the feelings of isolation and rejection expressed by so many of these broken young men.
For Colt Gray, we are too late, but for the potentially hundreds more with similar feelings of anger, suicide or leaving their mark by taking innocent lives…we STILL have time. We are hardening the targets, and that is a good thing. Now let’s go strengthen and better support our young men. There is still time.
