The Smug Baldy Speaks

Last Thursday, after a spate of deadly violence in American schools, President Bush vowed to make our schools safer:

“We are going to bring together teachers and parents and administrators and law enforcement officials and other experts to discuss ways to help our schools protect the children,” the president said. “See, it is paramount that the federal government work with the state government and local governments to make it clear that our schools are places of learning, not places where there be violence.”

Those are some strong – though interestingly sequenced – words. So why am I not reassured?

Because, he’s wrong. It’s not imperative that federal, state, and local governments work together to make it clear that schools are places of learning. That has never been an issue. Nope – I think everyone is clear on the point that schools should have something to do with learning.

What’s apparently not so clear is that it’s not OK to bring guns to school, nor that it’s not OK to shoot people. Especially children (even the ones you think are annoying).

Interestingly these past few weeks don’t represent the first time in our nation’s recent history that boys or men have brought guns into schools with the intent to kill young girls. Yes – that’s right. Some writers have noticed that the term “School Violence” should be considered a misnomer, and suggest that we should be discussing gender-based hate crimes in our schools – as the offenders are almost always male, and the victims are to a very large degree female.

But I digress. I certainly don’t expect this Administration to acknowledge the gender issues that surround violence against children in our schools. Nor do I expect anything else tangible from them. This is because there was already a program in place that had proven effective in deterring school violence – until this administration bled its funding and eventually eliminated it.

One year after the Columbine shootings, President Clinton had actually done something about school violence by creating the COPS in Schools (CIS) program as part of the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing.

Apparently, the CIS program worked – distributing grants to help local law enforcement hire new “school recource officers” to work in primary and secondary schools. In my opinion, having police in schools might not be a bad idea if you’re trying to deter handgun violence in those schools.

But, according to Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) the CIS program, which had a budget of $164 Million in the last year of the Clinton administration, had it’s budget reduced over each of the past four years to $5 Million – until it was eliminated. It turns out, that the White House Office Of Management and Budget says that the program was ineffective and so it was phased out.

So we took the cops out of the schools? Nice move, dipshit. No wonder the little girls were shot.

Thanks, but no thanks, Mr. Bush. We can’t really afford your brand of protection.