The United States is under attack. And the enemy comes from within.
The headlines and statistics are in front of us every day. Since April 20, 1999, the date of the Columbine massacre in Littleton. Colo., 233 children have died in school shootings. To say that number is staggering is a gross understatement.
But if history is an indicator (and it generally is), we'll spend lots of ink and electrons sending our thoughts, prayers and heartfelt condolences to the victims and their families. Here's a thought: How about we send a well-thought-out action plan from Congress to the president to combat this crisis?
I am a military man with 30 years of service from 1983 to 2013. That colors the way I think. I spent most of my career creating war plans and making sure our troops were ready to execute those plans. I spent six years at the Pentagon and served in a variety of command and staff jobs around the world. My teams were tasked with keeping America and our citizens safe. We weren't perfect, but we were pretty good at our jobs.
During my career I saw repeated attacks against our troops and our facilities. I joined the military the month after we lost 213 Marines in Beirut in 1983. I was in the Joint Operations Center at the Pentagon during the attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. I was in the Air Force Operations Center during the bombing of the USS Cole. And I was on duty in the Pentagon when terrorists attacked us on 9/11.
Yes, we were attacked, and yes, it hurt. I've handed folded flags to war widows, but you know what? More than sending my heartfelt condolences to their families, I went back to work and devised new and better ways for us to counter a determined enemy the next time.
What did we do after Beirut? Khobar Towers, the Cole, and the Pentagon? We implemented new measures, policies, plans and procedures. To counter truck bombs, we moved buildings and roads. To protect our ships we implemented new port procedures. We erected fences and other physical barriers, put up cameras, locked down facilities, added guards. We took positive action to ensure the safety of our troops and our facilities.
And it was not just the Department of Defense that had to counter attacks. The U.S. State Department has been under attack overseas for decades. Bombings, shootings, kidnappings, all perpetrated by determined adversaries of the United States, take place so often it's almost routine. But again, officials within the Department have taken positive action over the years to defeat the adversary. Ever try to get inside a U.S. Embassy overseas? It's now damn-near impossible, and casualties have dropped significantly as a result.
Bottom line: Want to keep out a determined adversary? Take positive action to control access and protect our schools and our children.
Some say gun control is the answer. Regardless of your view on the matter, that genie is out of the bottle. There's no going back. There is simply no way to successfully remove weapons from the hands of everyone tempted to do harm to innocents. It's not a matter of "assault" rifles, "bump-stocks" or any other weapon du jour used to inflict harm. If it's not an AR-15, it'll be an AK-47, or BB gun, or a butter knife. Gun or weapon control isn't the solution.
Some say it's a mental health issue. Unfortunately, interview after interview of surviving gunmen have revealed no definite defect or pattern or cause or motive among the shooters. How many times have we heard "he was quiet; kept to himself; never saw this coming; just as surprised as you are"? There's no universal mental health cause, no universal sign, and no universal mental health answer to this problem either.
So what do we do? We do what the Department of Defense did and we do what the State Department did when faced with adversaries determined to do us harm. We take positive action to come up with universal plans to control access and keep weapons out of our schools.
In my life after the military, I travel across the state to visit schools and photograph students. When arriving, I've seen everything from an open door to practically needing a retina scan to enter. The solution lies in eliminating what we call "county options" where each school or district is left to its own best judgment and budgetary constraints to figure out a security plan.
Historically, schools are the concerns of the states. But the issue of our children's safety is a federal concern. We need to create a federal agency whose sole responsibility is the safety and security of our schools. The DoD and DoS took action to protect their people. We did this with the NTSB after plane crashes, the FDA when our drugs were snake oil, OSHA when workers were dying. Why can't we do it for our schools?
Put the agency under Department of Homeland Security (if this isn't a Homeland Security issue, I don't know what is). Appoint a school safety czar and develop a plan to protect every school in the country.
How do we pay? Money earmarked for the border wall which experts say will have little real effect on illegal immigration should go to this effort first. Curtail foreign aid. Bring our troops home. Add taxes elsewhere. There are so many options to take positive action to control this scourge.
Locks, cameras, guards--they all sound so scary. But scarier than a disgruntled ex-student with a rifle? I wish we could all have class outside every day with unicorns and kittens, but that's not the world we live in. Homegrown terrorists are killing our children. It's time for positive action.
Please contact your congressmen and demand they take positive action to send an actionable plan to the president to combat this atrocity.
Tony Gatlin is a former enlisted Marine and retired Air Force officer. He holds a master of arts degree from George Washington University and a master of science degree from the Air Force University. He is originally from Benton and currently resides in Malvern, where he owns and operates a portrait photography studio.
Editorial on 02/25/2018