Photo credit: Martin Fredy
Wisconsin had another frightening reminder last week that it is located in the United States of America. Back-to-back shootings over two days by police officers wounding two students they said threatened them with a pellet gun and “an edged weapon” in high schools in Waukesha and Oshkosh were just the beginning. These shootings unleashed a surge of other reports about threats of gun violence at schools in Milwaukee, Madison, Waukesha, West Bend, Germantown and Sparta. Suddenly, the state was consumed with fear about gun violence threatening the lives of school children, but even that wasn’t enough to persuade Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders there was any reason to do anything to reduce easy access to guns in the state.
A month ago, Gov. Tony Evers called a special session of the Legislature to discuss rational ways to reduce gun violence in Wisconsin. Republicans simply gaveled the sessions in both chambers open and closed within seconds without even discussing the mildest possible proposals for universal background checks or allowing judges to remove deadly weapons from those deemed a danger to themselves or others. Evers told a Madison television station he still supports such laws—which were also favored by 80% of Wisconsinites in a recent Marquette University poll—but he added: “I’m a realist also. I witnessed what happened last time around. But if the Legislature wants to take them up, I’ll be more than happy to help get them passed.”
Fat chance of that. Instead of doing anything to protect school children from gun violence, many Republicans support their president’s demented proposal to put more deadly weapons into classrooms by arming teachers. Teachers will never be as well-trained as law enforcement officers in the use of firearms around human beings in extreme situations and that can be dangerous enough. There are still questions about trained officers shooting the two Wisconsin students who had a pellet gun and “an edged weapon.” An unarmed special education teacher in Waukesha was credited with breaking up a threat to another student by the boy with the pellet gun. The teacher then restrained the student as everyone else cleared the classroom until the officer arrived.
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‘Young Enough to Know Better’
Despite school districts throughout the state facing threats of gun violence, Republican legislators can’t even bring themselves to utter the G-word out loud anymore. Republicans have learned the best way to avoid doing anything about guns after every mass shooting in America is to develop a sudden interest in treating mental illness.
“Republicans have led the way in expanding mental health treatment opportunities in schools over the past several budgets,” said Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. Well, not really. Republicans approved about $25 million for children’s mental health programs over the next two years—far short of the $116 million requested by Evers in his budget. They also cut tens of millions of dollars from other requests by the governor to hire additional school counselors, psychologists and nurses and to train school resource officers how to de-escalate confrontations with troubled students. Republicans were far more interested in “hardening” school security than in providing necessary human services.
“Parents don’t want to send their kids to schools that look like prisons,” Evers said. That’s why he is ready to call Republicans on their dubious claim that they really care about the mental health needs of the state, which they’ve always underfunded. “I don’t view this mental health funding as something that is going to take care of gun safety issues, but it’s important,” Evers said. “It’s darn important.”
The reason Republicans can’t imagine themselves crouching in classroom closets listening to hundreds of shots being fired outside in school hallways is they’re not today’s teenagers. Ever since the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting in February 2018 killed 14 students and three adults and injured 17 others, the Parkland kids, along with our own kids, have been trying to tell us what we should be doing for them. They’ve marched for their lives and led spontaneous school walkouts in Wisconsin and across the country to protest everything adults haven’t been doing to protect their lives. They don’t think it’s too much to ask of us to ban from civilian use military assault weapons created for the battlefield and high-capacity ammunition magazines capable of shooting hundreds of people within seconds.
“Old enough to know better” is a meaningless cliché in today’s politics. It’s been superseded by “young enough to know better.” Young people today watch in disbelief as irresponsible legislators callously refuse to even consider urgent legislation benefitting everyone. They know adult inaction on gun violence—or environmental destruction of the planet—directly threatens their future. More of those politically active Parkland kids, and their successors in Wisconsin, reach voting age every year. That’s bad news for the survival of every elected Republican who puts short-term partisan politics over our children’s futures.
