Shedding tears as we shed our common sense on guns

Guns on display in 2023 at Caso’s Gun-A-Rama in Jersey City, New Jersey. (Aristide Economopoulos/for NJ Monitor)

It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

And one of my friends did just that during a recent school board meeting here in Rapid City as he was trying to offer public comment about a pending board decision on guns in schools.

Yes, guns in schools. How’s that for dissonance?

Remember those “What doesn’t belong?” elementary school exercises where you look for things in a picture that don’t belong there? How about guns in schools?

They don’t belong there.

Kids belong in schools. Books and teachers belong. PE and reading and math and, well, you know, all the things that fit in the school picture.

But guns? In schools? Who thinks that’s a good idea, unless you’re talking about a very limited number of guns in the hands of trained law-enforcement officers?

Well, the 2024 South Dakota Legislature seemed to think more guns in schools was a very good idea. By wide vote margins — 31-3 in the Senate and 62-8 in the House — lawmakers passed a bill with a title that read: “An act to expand certain privileges for individuals who hold an unrestricted enhanced concealed carry permit.”

Lawmakers advance bill allowing adult permit holders to carry concealed guns in schools

And the expansion of certain privileges? That’s where the guns come in. The guns in schools.

Prior to approval of Senate Bill 203, which was signed by the governor, only trained law-enforcement officers and designated school “ sentinels ” were authorized to carry firearms in public schools. And the sentinels have only been authorized in law since the state Legislature acted in 2013.

Now by expanding “certain privileges,” the new law allows the holder of an unrestricted enhanced concealed carry permit to enter a public school while carrying a firearm if he or she has “written permission from the principal of the school or other person who has general control and supervision of the building or grounds.”

Obviously, local school boards have a lot of control and supervision of buildings and grounds within their school districts. And the Rapid City Area Schools Board of Education ultimately exercised its authority on this issue by deciding not to implement the provisions of SB 203.

So my friend got the vote outcome he wanted. But why had he choked up even before the vote? It was the statistics that were presented to the board moments earlier by a representative of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America .

Statistics like this from Everytown for Gun Safety, a sister organization of Moms Demand Action:

• From 2013 through 2022, Everytown identified 720 incidents of gunfire on the grounds of a preschool or K-12 school across the nation, including gun homicides and assaults, suicides and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings and mass shootings.
• So far nationally in 2024 , there have been at least 107 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 29 deaths and 61 injuries.

It’s clear that we need to make our schools more secure. But is putting more armed civilians in our schools the way to do it? Our school board decided — wisely, I think — that it isn’t.

After the school board meeting, my friend explained his flood of emotions: “I started thinking about my grandkids and your grandkids. It could be anybody’s grandkids. The shootings. And all the guns we have, and talking about allowing them in schools. And I just lost it. I mean, what are we doing?”

What are are we doing, indeed? We are a nation of so many inspirational advancements, yet we are failing miserably in addressing a gun-violence problem that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently labeled a public health crisis .

Supporters of SB 203 argue that more “good guys with guns” in schools or accessible to schools makes them available to stop bad guys with guns, making schools safer. Moms Demand Action argues that more guns in the hands of civilians in schools are not likely to safely neutralize a threat but in fact could become threats in themselves.

Even trained law-enforcement officers can get rattled in stressful situations. And what’s more stressful than responding to an active shooter in a school?

We have a gun culture in this nation unknown in most advanced countries. For some Second Amendment advocates, all gun restrictions are bad and virtually all laws that open more areas to people — good guys, presumably — with guns are good.

Here in South Dakota, we haven’t just lost nuance when it comes to guns. We seem to have lost all common sense and sometimes any sense of propriety.

Here in South Dakota, we haven’t just lost nuance when it comes to guns. We seem to have lost all common sense and sometimes any sense of propriety.

I was referred to a disheartening example of that recently on the website of one of the Catholic parishes here in Rapid City.

The home page for Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church proclaims that it is “Continuing the Work of Jesus,” shows a picture of the attractive church and its fetching backdrop of cliff and pines, and asks: “Are you curious about spirituality?”

Scrolling down from there, I saw a pitch for the parish “ Fourth of July Gun Raffle .” It included four guns, the first of which was a CMMG MK4 semi-automatic rifle.

Many people would call the MK4 an assault rifle. I’ll call it an assault-style rifle or military style rifle, similar in appearance to the better-known AR-15. Whatever you call it, it’s fashioned after weapons of war and is a jarring sight on a church website, especially in these times.

And as a Catholic who belongs to another parish but attends Blessed Sacrament from time to time, I had to ask: “What were they thinking?”

Well, they were thinking they wanted to raise money for youth programs in the parish. That’s good. And when I last checked online, they’d raised more than $5,000. But in a time when mass shootings — many involving military style firearms — are a regular occurrence, couldn’t they raffle something else? Mountain bikes? E-bikes? Tents? Canoes? Fly rods?

Why raise money to fund “the work of Jesus” with guns? And why lead the raffle with a military style rifle, or include it at all? It seems tone-deaf, at best.

I’m sure those tickets sell. Guns carry an iconic status to many South Dakotans, some of whom are in positions of authority in our churches and in the state Legislature.

I guess that’s how we get military style rifles on church websites. And I guess it’s how we got yet another law aimed at putting more guns in places they really don’t belong, like schools.

Meanwhile, the gun-related carnage across this nation continues unabated, at a level that our surgeon general considers to be a public-health crisis.

If that isn’t worth crying over, I don’t know what is.

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