Innocence lost? Gun on Vero Beach campus sparks change you might expect at big-city school

Put Jan. 26, 2024, in the Vero Beach history book.

It's another milestone in a 40-year nationwide trend, which, for me, dates to June 7, 1984, in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

That day, Louis Mackerly, 7, was reported missing. As a reporter, I followed Allentown police to a park, where he reportedly had been seen hours after he told his babysitter he was going to play with a friend two homes down the block.

Mackerly was never found, but I’ll never forget his name or picture. After I moved months later to Florida, I'd see Mackerly and other missing children on the sides of milk cartons.

Indian River County was connected to two other highly publicized kidnapped or missing children of that era: David Rattray, who was returned to his parents safely, and Adam Walsh, who wasn't. About that time, many parents stopped letting their children roam their neighborhoods the way many of us had years before.

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The early 1980s also was when David Alan Gore, a former sheriff’s auxiliary deputy, preyed on young women in Indian River County.

Between February 1981 and July 1983, six women — most raped, some tortured, dismembered and buried in hidden graves in citrus groves west of Vero Beach ― were believed to have been slain by Gore, TCPalm reported. Gore was executed in 2012 after 28 years on Florida’s death row.

That’s when many Indian River County residents started locking their doors, according to David Morgan, a retired county judge and one of the prosecutors in Gore’s case.

“Vero Beach kind of lost its innocence,” Morgan told me in 2020.

Impact of Columbine, Parkland, Lunsford

Since then, the nation has focused on children's safety in other ways:

There is little tolerance for teens driving after drinking alcohol. Passing Breathalyzer tests is required to enter some school functions.

Florida passed the Jessica Lunsford Act after the Citrus County girl, 9, was abducted from her home and killed in 2005. The act requires volunteers and independent contractors working in schools to provide fingerprints and pay for background checks.

Requirements were placed on coaches and officials who work with children. This includes training on concussions and from SafeSport, an agency designed to end all sorts of abuse, including "grooming," in sports.

Following the 1999 shooting that killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado and one in Parkland at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 students in 2018, many Florida school districts went all in on school security. That included spending staggering sums of money on high-tech video systems, completely fencing-in campuses and hiring school resource officers and security guards.

Schools not fenced-in everywhere

Friday, though, Vero Beach High School did more, requiring students to pass through metal detectors on their way into school.

It’s a shame Vero Beach, and perhaps Sebastian River High School next, must resort to preventive measures once found only in urban schools.

Most schools I see outside of Florida are not even partly fenced in. Do those schools’ parents and children worry more than those in Indian River County?

Indian River County school officials face a no-win situation. Safety always has been a priority for parents and school employees. So when school officials, during a probe into alleged bathroom vaping last week, searched a bag and found a handgun in a backpack, they had to act to ensure weapons were no longer taken onto campus.

Officials brought in wide, portable metal detectors they’d bought with Sheriff Eric Flowers for use at sporting events and dances.

How prevalent are school shootings?

“They could pop up at any school at any time,” Flowers said. “If you’re showing up on campus with a weapon, we’re going to find it.”

How concerned should we be about school shootings?

“An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist national survey from May found that 40% of respondents felt that schools in their community were unsafe with regard to the risk of gun violence, up from 30% in 2019,” James Alan Fox, a mass shootings researcher and professor at Northeastern University, wrote in an August 2023 column in USA TODAY.

But Fox wrote fears are “fueled by the widely reported — and somewhat misleading — statistics on school shootings: more than a hundred a year, according to databases from Everytown for Gun Safety and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security.”

When you strip out school shootings classified as suicides, accidents or not occurring during school, Fox said the picture is more realistic.

“Over the past two dozen school years (1999-2000 onward), the (Washington) Post’s database includes 384 incidents, averaging 16 per year — not hundreds, but still alarming,” he wrote. “However, three-quarters resulted in no fatalities and one-third in no one being shot.”

That’s about one incident per every 8,060 schools, based on 2020 figures of 128,961 schools nationwide, according to Education Week.

Or as Fox put it, about eight students have been killed per year out of more than 60 million students and staff, a 1-in-8 million risk.

“A total of 112 of these victims were gunned down indiscriminately, and 74 of those were associated with four incidents having double-digit death tolls,” he wrote.

Expert criminologist: 'The real epidemic is fear'

From USATODAY: Mass killing database: Revealing trends, details and anguish of every US event since 2006

The latest study on school shootings, from Education Week, noted shootings were down, from a record-high 51 in 2022 to 38 in 2023. Over the past six years, there has been an average of 30 per year.

“The real epidemic is fear,” Fox wrote, noting Americans spend $3 billion a year to prevent in-school shootings, which, he said, mostly take place in parking lots and athletic fields.

It’s fear — perhaps stoked in some places by folks on opposite sides of the gun rights-gun control battle, by partisans trying to get our votes or by police or teacher unions seeking our support.

To me, the real problem is one of humanity. While some of us try to be accountable for our own actions and to make the world a better place, others aren't wired that way for a variety of reasons as old as Cain and Abel.

How can we prevent a teenager from bringing a gun to school? It’s tough to solve that problem at 18, the age of the student charged with bringing the gun into Vero Beach High School.

Not everyone has support from a family with values. Not everyone has faith, hope and dreams for a good life after school. Not everyone has good judgment.

We're human. We live in an imperfect world. Bad things will happen, though Flowers mentioned the other day his agency had only one gun-related murder in 2023.

As imperfect as our world is, we cannot cower in fear. Things are not as bad as some folks would like us to believe.

This column reflects the opinion of Laurence Reisman. Contact him via email at larry.reisman@tcpalm.com, phone at 772-978-2223, Facebook.com/larryreisman or Twitter @LaurenceReisman.

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This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Metal detectors really needed after gun found in VBHS teen's bag?