On April 3, an active shooter was reported to be on the San Marcos High School campus. This information was disclosed to police, who instructed San Marcos to undergo a shelter-in-place. Staff and students hid while officers searched the area. The incident turned out to be a “swatting” call, meaning that the report was a hoax.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that no one at San Marcos was injured or in danger that day. The shelter-in-place was lifted at 11:15 am, allowing everyone a momentous sense of relief. The events that occurred after this report are an eye-opening example of why swatting calls are illegal: they give people an unnecessary sense of danger and fear of grim outcomes. It is highly disappointing this incident occurred, especially taking in consideration the amount of school shootings that ensue each year.

The article ‘Will school shootings in 2023 outpace last year’s record high’ allows readers to understand the tremendous amount of school shootings and confirms that numbers have been increasing annually.

“The mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, that took the lives of six—including three children—on March 27 brought the year’s school shooting count to 89, with 75 total victims injured or killed. By comparison, there were 80 shootings with 65 total victims killed or wounded by March 27, 2022,” Naaz Modan wrote.

School shootings are an issue present in every grade level. The K-12 School Shooting Database is an online database that records the data on school shootings from 1970 to the present. Data shows that 63.6% of school shootings are at high school levels.

Data on the K-12 SSD website showing the percentages of school shooting incidents across different education levels.

Many students at other high schools, such as Dos Pueblos, have friends that attend San Marcos or have a connection to someone who works there. The swatting call showed everyone a part of what it would be like if there was a shooter on campus.

A solution was created in the event of a school shooting incident by storm shelter construction company Shelter-In-Place. This company originally sold storm shelters that protected against natural disasters, but now has included ballistic testing on their shelters and have proven their shelters to be multi-purposeful. Some schools already have installed or plan to install these storm shelters, which protect against tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. They also double as protection against school shooters. Whether this is a good solution is up for debate.

“I don’t think there’s any other country in the world that has to install bulletproof classrooms like in America. It happens too much that they had to do it. I think it’s a good solution, but also, it’s a shame,” sophomore Max Phan said.

Freshman Eleni Becker shared a similar opinion on the bulletproof safe rooms.

“I think it’s a temporary solution. I feel like there could definitely be more done, but for now it’s the best that we can do,” she said.

Although these shelters seem like a good temporary solution, installing them would be a large investment and very time consuming. The cost of each shelter varies depending on grade level and the amount of students in a class.

According to the pricing section of the Shelter-In-Place website, the shelter cost for a middle school classroom that has 20 students and 1 teacher is roughly $21,000. Similar calculations can be used to estimate the cost for any other space in a school, including common areas like cafeterias, gyms, and libraries.

Since it is $21,000 for 20 middle school students and 1 teacher, it would cost a significant amount of money to install several of these bulletproof shelters on a school campus. Especially because there are high schools with over 2,000 students, plus staff, we must come up with other solutions to solve these underlying issues.

Bulletproof safe rooms are not a good solution for everyone because every school has a different budget to implement more advanced safety measures and resources. Many schools do not have the funds to install these shelters. In the meantime, there is one solution schools can implement to help fix this issue.

“I think just take care of your students better. There’s obviously in-school counseling, but I don’t see very many people go to in-school counseling. They just don’t feel very comfortable with it, so maybe if students had someone their age to talk to, that’d maybe help them,” junior Ved Banerjee said.

Improving mental health support at schools is an important aspect fixing this issue, as well as speaking out on governmental decisions that affect this problem. The current gun laws state that a person needs to be eighteen or older to purchase a firearm.

“I think they should be more strict with guns [and] the gun laws. Not completely ban guns but raise the age limit higher. Here you can get a gun easier than alcohol,” Max said.

Eleni believes gun laws should be changed in accordance with the advancement of the technology of guns.

“We need an update on our gun laws because when the second amendment was made the guns were nowhere near what they are today,” she said.

Several solutions for this problem could be utilized, such as revising the existing gun laws and improving the mental health support in every level of education. Most schools provide therapists for students to talk to, but only a small number of students feel comfortable speaking to them. This is because school therapists are mandated to share with others if a student discloses about being depressed. Students should have the ability to anonymously talk to a therapist about being depressed or feeling ill in a broad sense, because this could allow students to feel more comfortable talking about issues before any harm to themselves or to others could potentially occur.

In the article ‘‘Suicide Prevention could prevent Mass Shootings’’ by Maggie Koerth, the ties between suicidal ideation and mass shootings are shown through the examples of many sources.

“Lankford is not the first person to find connections between suicide and mass shootings. In a database of more than 150 mass shootings that took place between 1966 and 2018, Densley found that about half the attackers in his sample had demonstrated signs of feeling suicidal before they hurt others. A different set of researchers who analyzed 41 school shooters for the Secret Service and Department of Education found that 78 percent had a history of thinking about or attempting suicide,” she wrote.

Besides mental health support, each classroom and office should have higher windows when being constructed, as well as ensuring doors have strong locks. I believe installing some gates around campus would reduce the possibility of an unknown person being able to come onto campus. This would be less expensive than bulletproof rooms and provide more safety in the possibility of an active shooter on campus. These changes would help in truly fixing this issue.