In the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last week, many are searching for ways to prevent future school shootings.
While some have pushed for stricter gun laws, others believe the focus needs to be on adding more security to the schools themselves.
Recently on WVNN’s “The Dale Jackson Show,” Alabama’s fifth congressional district candidate Casey Wardynski discussed different steps that would help keep students safe in schools.
“I think it’s like most complex problems,” he said. “It’s multi-tiered.”
Wardynski, who is the former superintendent for Huntsville City Schools, talked about steps he took that were successful in preventing violence at the schools.
“[W]e never had a shooting,” he said, “and we had some really rough kids. We had gangs. We headed them off by knowing who they were. We looked at if they were on YouTube putting up beatdowns in the neighborhood of some kid or on YouTube with drugs and money in their hands, we knew who they were.”
The congressional candidate also said they took steps to secure the school building itself to prevent nefarious actors from ever being able to enter the school in the first place.
“We had fences on our property to make sure it was clear where our property was,” he explained. “We enforced all the rules about no drugs, no guns, no nothing near our school. We had school resource officers, and we even did things around transportation because you’ll remember there was a shooting in our state on a bus down south. We had cameras.”
Wardynski said they even looked at safety when designing new school buildings.
“We brought in Army Special Forces as we designed our schools to take the lessons from the attack on Beslan school in Russia and Columbine into account, and so we had a system where we’d trap any bad guys in the hallways and the kids would get out of the building by going from classroom to classroom. Each had adjoining doors so they wouldn’t be trapped like these poor kids were down in Texas.”
When asked if he would support any new gun control laws in Congress, Wardynski reaffirmed his support for the Second Amendment.
“It’s the Second Amendment,” he continued, “I’m for the right to bear arms. It’s already regulated pretty heavily. There’s nothing to do with the Second Amendment that would have stopped this kid. We’ve had plenty of shootings across this country where lots of rules were in place in states that have a lot of control and it didn’t do anything to stop this.”
He emphasized the need to get serious about identifying those who suffer from mental health issues.
“The answers are early identification,” he argued. “This kid had cutting on his face. That’s a warning sign right there. He should have been in the hands of mental health. These other kids in Parkland and Columbine, there were signals there, too. The mental health piece, as Governor Abbott pointed out, is pretty key.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” Weekdays 9-11am on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
Don’t miss out! Subscribe today to have Alabama’s leading headlines delivered to your inbox.