Editor’s note: On Wednesday, Sep.4 a mass shooting occurred at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. A 14-year old student opened fire and killed two students and two teachers. With Appalachee only being two hours away from us, The Trail Staff started sharing their opinions on gun safety and school security. 

The 14-year old shooter was charged with four counts of murder and is expected to be tried as an adult. District Attorney, Brad Smith said he will be facing additional charges, the grand jury will reconvene on Oct.17.

The Trail will follow this story.  

Opinions expressed in editorials are those of the writer(s).  These views may not represent those of the adviser; of the Trail staff as a whole; of the Trail’s advertisers; of the administration, faculty or staff of McIntosh High School; of Fayette County Public Schools or of the FCBOE School Board members.  

From “The Bullets He Carried,” an emergency physician’s opinion on the destructive nature of modern weapons, by Stephen W. Hargarten, MD.

When JD Vance stood on a podium and said that mass shootings are “a fact of life,” he was absolutely wrong.

When people say that we need to “pray” for the people affected by the shooting, that’s not enough.

School shootings are avoidable.

The answer is not reaction, it’s proaction. We need to work on preventing school shootings and mass shootings through behavioral assessment and available counseling.

The answer is not more guns, more security, or more drills. We need to stop these kids from being able to have access to these weapons in the first place.

JD Vance, endorsed by and chosen as the 2024 Vice-Presidential candidate by Donald Trump, wants to “bolster security at our schools.”

In the face of such large-scale attacks, it is easy for people to feel helpless and insignificant. The one thing every United States citizen can do is vote. Vote for someone who does not blindly accept the frequency of school shootings and instead looks to eliminate the cause of the problem.

Gun control laws worry people because they fear the loss of their property and they feel that their rights may be violated.

The second amendment, written in 1791, states “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The “arms” mentioned in this quote refer to the most technologically advanced weapons of the time— muskets and flintlock pistols. These weapons could only hold one round at a time, required manual reloading, meaning that within one minute, the average assailant could fire one, maybe two, shots.

The weapon used to kill 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012 fired 154 times in less than four minutes, at a rate of about 38 bullets per minute. The weapons that people have readily access to and are fighting for are not the technology as the ones the founding fathers strove to protect in 1791. They aren’t even comparable. It may be a second amendment right, but the outdated writing does not account for the semi-automatic weapons of modern day. If we truly wish to honor the wishes of American founders and strive for greatness, safety and freedom, the restriction of accessibility of guns needs to be a priority.

Kamala Harris proposes gun buy-backs, ensuring that nobody’s property is taken without proper compensation. Gun-owners are worried about their rights to their guns, and that is understandable.

What needs to happen is restrictions on licensing and availability of guns. In order to move forward as a country, children should not have access to guns. People with a criminal history should not have access to guns.

In the case of Sandy Hook, the shooter obtained the semi-automatic Bushmaster Model XM15-R2S rifle from his mother. In the case of the Uvalde school shooting, the AR-style guns bought by the shooter were bought completely legally as an 18-year-old in Texas.

Nobody wants to take away guns completely. Weapons that can kill multiple people at a time need to be kept out of our schools and away from children.

Editor’s note: for context and clarity, the Trail republished this segment with Vance’s full remarks:

CNN reporter Kit Maher asked JD Vance “In the wake of the Georgia school shooting yesterday, I wanted to ask you, what specific policies do you support to end school shootings like this?” during a Sept. 5 campaign stop in Phoenix.

Politifact originally published Vance’s full response to Maher’s question, in context.

“What happened in Georgia is just an awful tragedy and I know we’ve got a lot of parents and a lot of grandparents in this room. I mean, I cannot imagine, you know, little kids so excited to go back to school. God love them. And they’re at their first week back from the summer and an absolute barbarian decides to open fire and take their lives, and also a couple of teachers. We gotta, we gotta think about these people if you’re the praying type, and I know I am, we gotta hold them up in prayer.

“We gotta be hoping for the best for these, for this incredible community because no parent should have to deal with this. No child should have to deal with this. And, yes, after holding these folks up in prayer and giving them our sympathies, because that’s what people deserve in a time of tragedy, then we have to think about how to make this less common.

“Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do. But we have to ask ourselves, we actually have, have been able to run an experiment on this because you’ve got some states with very strict gun laws and you’ve got some states that don’t have strict gun laws at all. And the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings and the states without strict gun laws, some of them have school shootings, too. So, clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem.

“What is going to solve this problem? And I really do believe this is, look, I, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you’re, if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets, and we have got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … we, we’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.

“And again, as a parent do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course, I don’t. I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.

“And a, and a bunch of my colleagues in the Senate, we actually worked on legislation that would give schools more resources to bolster their security because if these psychos are gonna go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it.

“We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the, the reality that we live in. We got to deal with it.”

Gun violence is a national issue. State laws for gun use are too lax and they need to be changed. 

Gun laws, especially for communities and school zones, need to have restrictions placed on them. Who carries dangerous weapons and under what circumstances a person carries those weapons needs to be regulated.

The tragedy of Apalachee is a testament to this. With the shot of a gun, a shockwave of hurt, pain and loss hits not only the school and its surrounding area, but the nation. We live in a nation where, apparently, children can carry guns. Children, who don’t even have fully developed brains, can carry guns. If guns in the area had more restrictions placed on them–maybe it would make a difference. I’m firm in where I stand when I say that we need more regulations because we can’t continue to have the freedom to use firearms if we cannot do so responsibly. We need more rules. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Students should be at school for their education. We shouldn’t have to worry about our life. A 14-year old boy opened fire on Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Winder, Georgia is only 2 hours away from Peachtree City, Georgia. So what does this mean for us? Security for schools is crucial for students’ safety. Shootings and threats are going to continue to happen if we don’t do something about it. More gun laws need to be put in place to fix this issue.

Gun violence has been a frequent and progressing issue in the United States and not many actions to stop the violence have been made. There needs to be more gun laws put into place, as well as more restrictions and tests on individuals that want to obtain a firearm license because guns should not be so easily obtainable for students to have and use.

Attitudes at school need to be noticed and dealt with accordingly through counseling, therapy, tutoring, or whatever a student with agonizing thoughts may need. Behavioral assessments are crucial in times when violent acts and depressions are widely renowned.

Maybe we should up the counseling to be more than just guidance counselors. Making extra laws on the weapon is useless since it’s only dangerous when someone picks it up. That, and criminals break laws. Increase transparency between students and assemblies/counselors so we can eliminate curiosity concerning weapons, and other dangerous topics (i.e: drugs, alcohol, etc…)

Student’s mental health should be taken more seriously. According to the Statista Research Department, 72 out of 150 mass shootings in the US from 1982-2024 are linked to mental illnesses. This proves that mental illnesses are typically a key factor in mass shootings. What could schools do to slow the stress and depression rates in their students? Also, bullying is a big factor too. Lots of schools talk about being anti-bullying, but when something is actually reported, they sometimes don’t do anything.

We never practice with what to do in the scenario of a lock down during class exchange or lunch.

It would be more beneficial and practical for us as a student body to encourage the school to have more practice so in case of an emergency situation. We will be prepared and ready to stay safe if we practice and have more drills.

We currently only have a code red drill two per year, and while the chances of it happening to our school aren’t very high, the possibility is never zero. It’s better to be safe than sorry, so we should encourage the facility and school board to have more code red drills so the students here at McIntosh will be diligent and prepared for any scenario.

There should also be less financial investment in things like tearing out the baseball and soccer fields, and more investment of metal detectors and mental health resources. More schools need to add metal detectors and mandatory inventory checks of people entering the school after drop off.  Gun safety classes should be given in school.

Almost everyone who doesn’t live under a rock knows what we do and where we hide in most rooms. If we receive a red threat while swapping classes most people have no clue what to do or where to go. After the first shot people would run and people would be trampled by others. Students don’t know what to do in every class period and would probably end up freaking out instead of staying calm.

The Board of Education needs to require more code red drills and need to rework how they are done.

It is time we elect someone who will promote stronger gun laws.

According to Everytown Research, Georgia takes 46th place in the country on how weak its gun laws are. Georgia has none of these:

• Background Checks and Purchase Permits
• Concealed Carry Permit Required 
• Extreme Risk Law 

In April 2024, the Biden Administration released plans for making communities more safe.  According to the White House, “The Biden-Harris administration announces new action to implement bipartisan safer communities act, expanding firearm background checks to fight gun crime.”  It is up to the leaders of today to do something about this issue as they are the ones in power.

Call upon those leaders and make sure they know that their voters’ voices need to be heard. Better yet, that the students and parents’ voices need to be heard so this wouldn’t be such a recurring incident.

To the phrase that is used, “Never Again” should mean never again.