When I hear about all the shootings that have happened, whether they were at schools or movie theaters or wherever, I always put it into my own perspective. What would happen if the shooting was at Johnston?

With our new security procedures I do feel safer, but there’s always that twinge of doubt in the back of my mind if locking the doors is enough or if it’s just wishful thinking.

Some schools in South Dakota and Texas are arming their faculty with concealed weapons. Although the nation is being pushed in this direction, having weapons in our schools does not resolve any issue.

First, the teachers aren’t even trained to handle weapons.

“I don’t think arming anyone that is not trained to be armed is a good idea,” police officer Jessica Jensen said.

The school would have to put all of the faculty through special classes just to be able to handle the guns.

There’s also a difference between knowing how to shoot a gun and actually being able to shoot at a person if it came to that in a situation.

“I wouldn’t fire a weapon at somebody, even if I had the proper training,” teacher Tim Brickley said. “I wouldn’t want to be armed, let’s just put it that way.”

Secondly, there are so many things that could happen while holding a live weapon at your side. Just the thought of having guns in our elementary schools makes me cringe.

When it comes to actually dealing with the issue, however, I don’t think that more security would solve things. I think that we need to create better bonds between students and teachers.

“I think one thing we could do is make sure there are open lines of communications between students and adults, and teachers and parents, all those things,” Brickley said. “So if you got a message that seemed a little precarious from somebody else, not sure what it meant or weren’t comfortable with what it was, [open lines mean] you’re willing to tell somebody about it.”

In addition to creating bonds, we need better education about mental disorders, seeing that many of the shootings involved people affected by them. By educating society on these issues I think it would benefit the security by giving a deeper understanding to why events like shootings happen. Also if we understand why they happen, we can do a better job of preventing them from happening in the first place.

Instead of opening up our gun cases, we need to open up our minds.