Metal Detectors In Schools Essay, Research Paper

Imagine that your child attends a public school, as the majority of children in the nation do. One day, you?re not feeling too well, so you decide to relax, take a sick day and stay home from work. You?re in front of the TV, watching some lousy daytime soap, when the local news station breaks through with a report of a shooting inside the local school, where your teenage son goes. Worst case scenario: your very own son is an unfortunate victim, undeserving yet nevertheless subject to the wrath of this crazed student killer(s). Not likely, you say? Probably the same idea in the heads of parents in Columbine, Jonesboro, and countless other less celebrated cases of these horrible shootings prior to the massacres.

How might these incidents be prevented? Well, nobody can say for sure. One of the most popular ideas has been the installment of metal detectors at the doors of our schools. Needless to say, any parent (or anybody) would rather see on the six o?clock news that two students attempted to enter a school with an arsenal of weapons with intent to kill but were caught by metal detectors than to see that they were successful. The idea of metal detectors seems to be a good and logical one. Metal detectors would detect weapons attempted to be brought into our schools. Therefore they would surely prevent these incidents and keep our kids from being killed or wounded at one of the supposed safest places for them. Sure, it would be expensive, causing a raise in taxes, but who is to put a value on a human life? Ask any of the parents whose children have been murdered at their school if they would object to contribute to paying for metal detectors. Wouldn?t saving even one life be worth the hassle? Of course! What if it was your child, or your spouse was the teacher who was gunned down? That would most certainly change your views. Our kids already have enough things to worry about at school, what with trying to fit in, to getting good grades, to bullies, to mean teachers, to principals, to horrible cafeteria food than to have to worry about being killed. How many more times will this happen before we install metal detectors? Metal detectors are a great idea!

Exactly. A great idea. So many people are quick to say that metal detectors need to be installed that they tend to overlook the actual process of doing it. It simply does not work like you may think in your head that it does. People seem to think that bam! you install metal detectors at the door and wham! any kid with a weapon will set it off, and will be frisked and promptly arrested. Unfortunately it is not so simple. Assuming that the money to buy and install them is not an issue, there are many more things that make it impractical. First of all, do you install them at every entrance to the school? Or do you lock most of them and pick a choice few? Wouldn?t that create a fire hazard in the need for speedy evacuation? Kids do not necessarily enter school in a single-file line. What happens when four or five kids enter at the same time and the detector goes off? How many people do you need at each door to handle these situations, and how much time will this process take from the school day? We all know that metal detectors cannot specifically detect weapons only, they will go off at anything metal. Watches, rings, keys, and countless other objects may cause innumerable false alarms. What happens when 90% of the kids cause the detectors to go off? We do not have the time, the resources, nor the people to make this a workable idea.

Metal detectors in our schools may be a good thought but certainly not a practical concept. As stated earlier, there are too many issues bogging down the practicality and efficiency. There are many things that may sound good in theory, but would never work in the ?real world?. For example, it sounds right that in order to eliminate poverty in our country, the government could simply print a lot of paper money and distribute. But anyone can tell you that that could not and would not work. In the same way, metal detectors seem like the way to protect our schools, but actually carrying out the plan is much too unrealistic.