‘Tis the season

With September breaking out onto the scene, fall is sure to become a reality soon, and that means all the lovely sights and sounds of the harvest, the turning of the leaves and, oh yeah, school shootings.

That’s right if you thought this blog had been conspicuously quiet on that subject in recent months, you’d be correct, and for the least nefarious of reasons: school is out during the summer.

So, imagine how disappointing it was to wake up to our first school shooting of the season this morning (that I know of anyway). On Sept. 4, a suspect of student age walked into Apalachee High School in Georgia and killed at least four people and injury 30 more. It resulted in all schools in the district being placed in lockdown with no other reported secondary incidents occurring.

I think we’ve gone through the motions enough time in this space to accurately reflect how I feel about these events. More than that, I think we’ve discussed at length how wildly unnecessary these tragedies are and how preventable they could be, but that kind of action is out of the hands of one journalist, and any one industry.

We are, however, the industry best positioned to mitigate the damage done by these incidents, with an excellent set of tools at our disposal to help reduce and eliminate as much violence as possible. Of one of the more featured platforms I cover on this site, ZeroEyes has been deployed in dozens of school districts in the past few years, among other public spaces.

I don’t know offhand if Apalachee High School had a comprehensive video monitoring platform or commercial-grade security system in place, either gun or gunshot detection, but I know that they needed it. Schools will keep needing them into the foreseeable future until something more can be done.

Until then, I hope that as an industry we just keep doing what we can.