New school. First day. The school buses are crayon yellow, the leaves are summer green and the kids funneling through the fire-engine-red doorways look like the progeny of the cast of those Seventies commercials, the people who wanted to buy the world a Coke.
It couldn't happen here, could it? If there were risks attached to spending a year in Chicago, plucking our two girls from the shelter of their fine all-Irish school in Harmonstown, Dublin, and inserting them into the teeming Chicago public school system, they seemed like educational risks. Old-world prejudices (unfounded, incidentally) suggested that the experience would be like lobotomising them for a year.
The idea of them getting shot while attending this leafy middle-class grove of elementary academia seemed remote. So why was there a security guard with a metal detector at each door and a policeman at the end of the street blocking off traffic?
After a week or two, the appearance of the guards with the metal detectors became random and sporadic, but last week, after the shooting of Kayla Rolland at Buell Elementary in neighbouring Michigan, they were back, as a symbol of reassurance if nothing else.
The news of a six-year-old boy bringing a .32 calibre semi-automatic from home to a classroom and targeting another kid was enough to send a shiver through every school in America.
It couldn't happen here. Probably they'd said the same thing in Pearl, Mississippi, and Littleton, Colorado, and Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and West Paducah, Kentucky, and Conyers, Georgia, and the long list of other towns which have experienced gun violence in the school.
The issue represents one of the most baffling and impenetrable fogs in American culture. Before we came here, friends who had lived in America for many years said that we would find elements of the culture which were much more foreign than anything to be encountered in the rest of the English-speaking world. The attitude towards guns encapsulates that.
Before Christmas I was having lunch with an anti-death penalty campaigner, and in the course of us happily swapping our bleeding-heart-liberal stories he suggested that attitude towards the death penalty was one of the litmus tests for him when it came to voting for presidential candidates.
I said that I supposed that the death penalty and gun control occupied a lot of people's thoughts in that way. He snapped back that the only gun control he was interested in was being able to put his second bullet through the same hole in which he'd put his first. Then he called for the bill.
The debate runs beyond the simple rhetoric which characterises the pro- and anti-gun-control thinking. Educationalists aren't grappling with the rather trite proposition that guns don't kill people, people do; they can't afford to wait for the day when America has seen enough senseless shootings. They are dealing with kids who exist in a culture flooded with guns, and are treating the gun issue as a public health challenge.
The statistics are frightening. Every two minutes in America somebody is wounded by a gun. In 1998, handguns killed 22,000 Americans. In the school year 1997-1998, some 3,930 kids were expelled from schools across America for having a weapon in school under the auspices of the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994. Those gathering the statistics noted that this was a decrease of one-third on the previous year's number, but lamented that it gave no indication of how many guns were being brought to school undetected.
A national survey in 1995 found that 9 per cent of adolescents admitted to having brought a gun to school at one time or another The same survey found, out of 146 schools surveyed, 67 per cent of them had a gun in them at some stage during the previous month. A quarter of adolescents have guns in their homes, and in 99 per cent of schools surveyed at least one child admitted to having "easy access" to a gun. In a country awash with an estimated 240 million guns, those numbers are unnerving, but not surprising.
Here in Chicago, the city is suing the weapons industry for $433 million in policing and health costs occurred since 1994 for "contributing to a public nuisance" by oversupplying suburban stores with guns.
The solutions available to educationalists range from the sincere to the whacky. Working backwards across that scale: the National Rifle Association (NRA) sends a man dressed up as a bird and named Eddie Eagle into classrooms to instruct children to respect guns and to handle them safely. In a country where adults can be convicted for driving without a seatbelt but where it isn't mandatory to have a safety lock on a gun in the home, the NRA approach seems a little disingenuous. Many schools have opted for increased security measures as a first line of defence. It is increasingly common - not just in innercity schools - to see corridors and classrooms presided over by surveillance cameras. Many schools in Chicago require students to carry books and belongings in transparent or mesh bags, airport-style metal detector arches are common at school entrances and locks and buzzers have begun to proliferate. Many schools are considering the removal of student lockers from their corridors.
