Editorials

Once again, the understandable anxiety about the guns which have been recovered from students at Berkeley High has surfaced, this time as a report from a committee formed to see what could be done about the problem. The group was convened after a series of frightening incidents where Berkeley High students were discovered to have guns on campus. Since then, the situation has attracted quarts of virtual ink. 

Our take is approximately the same as it was in March. Entirely too many teenage boys, in Berkeley and elsewhere, have access to handguns and are tempted to carry them for all of the usual reasons. An April front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle came up with the same conclusion, even, to my surprise, quoting by name the same student (a family friend) I’d previously quoted anonymously in my editorial: 

"People who bring guns are more scared than anything," said senior Jamil Whetstone, 18. "Half the time they show them off. Lets everybody know they got them. There are so many guns walking past you, you wouldn't know." 

Jamil’s an upstanding young man from a solid Berkeley home whose passion is being on the Berkeley High football team. He’s easy to talk to, not frightening or hostile in any way. He knows that he has to watch his back, not only at school but on the street, because guns are everywhere these days. 

Online comment chains appended to stories like this one perform a valuable function, providing a spontaneous soapbox for sincere people who need to vent their hopes and fears for the safety of their children. Unfortunately, they also provide a window into the biased conclusions of poorly informed people who believe that a vehemently expressed opinion can substitute for factual analysis. 

It’s a major contemporary cliché, yes, but one more time: “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.” 

As far as I’ve been able to determine, no one has shown, based on real evidence, that a higher percentage of Berkeley High students carry guns than those in a matched group of similar young persons anywhere in any urban setting in California. Nevertheless, the committee report has drawn fire from a group of readers of two good summary articles on the topic published on the berkeleyside.com site. These commenters seem to believe that it’s possible for the Berkeley Unified School District to build an effective (or even literal) wall around the Berkeley High School campus to shield kids from the horrors of modern urban society. Similar comments can be found in various other online publications. 

Some of the commenters believe that the problem is that the school admits kids from outside the district… as if kids who are bonafide Berkeley residents are not also caught up in the culture of violence. In fact, transfer students are more likely to be ambitious outstanding kids. 

I’ve known a number of young people in recent years who were registered at Berkeley High—legally or illegally—from addresses where they don’t actually sleep every night. Many kids these days have more than one parental home from which to choose. 

Without exception, the ones I’ve known have been well-behaved high achievers with conscientious parents who chose Berkeley High because they wanted their kids to get the kind of superior education for which it’s famous. Some are jazz musicians recruited for the school’s world-renowned program. One girl who lives most of the time with her mother in Albany even won a major scholarship to an Ivy League school.  

The kids who are looking for trouble (or who fear trouble) and have the guns to prove it are just as likely to be domiciled in Berkeley as not.  

Close the campus for lunch? The report, sensibly, doesn’t hold out much hope for that tactic. Even if it were possible to confine all 3,000 Berkeley High students on the much too small downtown campus for lunch, it would do nothing to prevent ill–intentioned students from bringing their guns when they arrive in the morning (and the committee says that all six who were recently caught with weapons did just that.) Has any student picked up a gun at lunchtime? Not that I’ve heard. 

Metal detectors sound great, but there are plenty of guns around these days with mostly non-metal parts which can easily pass through them, and the lines would be unmanageable. ID cards offer no protection against legitimately enrolled students who carry guns, and there’s no reason to believe that the gun problem is confined to non-enrolled young people. The main committee recommendation which makes some sense is adding security personnel, both police and civilian, and making sure that they are dressed so that they can easily be identified if trouble requires their help.  

Many of the concerned citizens, both parents and others, still hope that public schools can summon up that Harry-Potteresque Invisible Wall to protect our young people from the troubles of the world around them, at least while they’re trying to study. But five random passersby on Market Street in San Francisco were recently caught in gang crossfire and wounded—and the same thing could happen on Shattuck in Berkeley, before or after school, involving students or non-students.  

Boys these days, sad to say, and even occasional girls, sometimes get ahold of guns, with predictable bad outcomes, whether on campus or off. It’s a problem that needs a more general solution, and it’s unreasonable to expect school officials to be able to solve it on their own.