Agree

by Charles Fleyn

Created on: December 03, 2009

Schools can be a dangerous place, or rather, we can be lead to believe that. What with the rampant drug use and concealed knives, it really looks like school for kids is more dangerous than the streets of London, at night, in the fog. Okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but occasionally this does occur. Of course, using a metal detector would probably not eradicate these problems, they would possibly help to reduce the risk of injury or damage to the faculty. Such a metal detector would probably be ineffective on it's own however, and require several monitors. But, surely all you need are the monitors themselves, rendering the detectors themselves obsolete. Well, no. The monitors may miss something, ( Key point here: Concealed. ) which only the metal detector would pick up.

So yes, in theory a metal detector inside the faculty could indeed serve to help keep the building and students safe, via detecting knives and the wiring inside homemade explosives (Which are remarkably simple to make.) and even a gun, should circumstances require it. Unfortunately, there are several holes in this idea, many of them critical, and could lead to holes in faculty security. For example...

It's a metal detector. Now, it may feel like I'm stating the obvious, but it only detects METAL. And yes, although it would pick up guns and METAL knives, what about the composite, or plastic ones? Anyone with access to the Internet can easily acquire one of these weapons, and bypass the security easily. Another threat, that is similar, is that although the detector may pick up the copper wiring in homemade bombs, it will NOT pick up wiring if the bomb has none, and is a simple pipe explosive. Now, to make this detector effective, students would have to be asked to go through the detector at random, which presents administration and security problems. ( Random means that the one with the knife may just evade - turning security into a game of chance. ) Or on entering the building, which is safer, but will cost more, and bring us to the next problem, and that is that to avoid setting off the detector, then they would not be able to bring anything metal into faculty (Such as inhalers, Emergency Adrenaline, keys, etc...) or have to remove everything metal before entering (Which would cause backlog back out of the facility. )

In conclusion, although these detectors may cause some problems in the school, the potential security benefits the detectors offer are enough to overcome these problems. After all, it's better to play it safe, and avoid any incidents that may severely injure a pupil, or damage the faculty, and if installing metal detectors is the way to do it, that's fine by me.

Learn more about this author, Charles Fleyn.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.