Put School Kids, Not Vets, Though Metal Detectors
By
Bob Brewin
The San Diego City Council reached a compromise Tuesday over development of the Veterans Affairs Department’s 40-bed Aspire Center for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Some people vehemently opposed the center, which is to be near the Old Town Academy, a charter elementary school, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The City Council put off a decision on the center while the two sides worked out details of a pact in which VA has agreed to conduct a more rigorous screening process to “to ensure that no veteran deemed a danger would be allowed at the center,” the newspaper said. VA also agreed to add a second security guard during school hours, invoke a 10 p.m. curfew, keep a log of all instances of misbehavior and permit smoking only in an outdoor area not visible to students.
Since San Diego does not seem to have an ordinance banning outdoor smoking, I plan to fire up an entire pack outside the academy when I visit the city later this summer.
These strictures are not enough for the academy, however, which also wants VA to install a metal detector at the entrance to the center, to “to catch any veterans entering the center with a firearm,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Based on my quick Internet research, it would be a better idea to install the metal detector at the school, as historically kids, not adult vets, tend to run amok with guns. The Wikipedia “school shooting” entry records hundreds of instances in which tykes or teenagers took out their classmates or teachers dating back to 1853.
The City Council hearing on the vet center occurred less than a week after the San Diego Military Advisory Council reported military spending in San Diego will hit $20.6 billion this year, a staggering sum that probably helped focus the attention of the Council.
Congressman Bob Filner, D-Calif., the Ranking Member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee who is running for a new job as Mayor of San Diego, has been strangely silent through this whole kerfuffle – and, as anyone who attended or viewed last week’s House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing, we all know he is not shy when it comes to expressing himself.