While the protection of the students and faculty from threats should be a major concern for Pierce College, monitoring the entrances of the school is very much missing the forest for the trees.
As everyone who has stepped onto Pierce’s campus knows, the college is very vast and very open. There are multiple entrances and exits that circle the majority of the campus, and would require many people to patrol the area.
On paper, this is still plausible, as borders much larger have been maintained before, but unless people from the Sheriff’s Office take this role, the guarding of entrances will be a moot point entirely.
According to a report by CBS, former marine Ian David Long was able to kill 13 people inside Borderline Bar & Grill, including a security guard manning the front door that night, as well as Police Sergeant Ron Helus.
The problem here is not that our entrances need guarding, as that is a drop in the pond of a much bigger issue at hand; rather, people should be rallying for more gun control, and the State of California should take better care to make sure that those with questionable mental health backgrounds should be barred from owning firearms.
California does have tighter gun laws than most other states, and according to California’s Department of Justice website, by January 1st, 2019, “any person who, as of July 1, 2018, owns a firearm that does not bear a serial number assigned to it shall apply to the Department for a unique serial number or other mark of identification. (Penal Code 29180)”.
While this is great at identifying those who will own firearms in the future (Long himself purchased his firearm legally, according to ABC News), it doesn’t do much to stop criminals from hoarding unlicensed guns at all.
Unless something is done about United States’ gun laws (on both a state and national level), and so long as we keep skirting around the issue by addressing smaller grievances such as guarding entrances to a campus that is almost completely open in a 360 degree radius, then people’s lives will continue to be at the mercy of mad men with guns and other weapons meant to kill or mame.
Long is just one of many people who have exploited our nation’s weak gun laws and has used them to tragically take the lives of countless victims across the United States.