A sign at the start of the line informs you to withdraw all liquids, gels, and pastes from your luggage. Passengers grumble as they take off their shoes and start shuffling through their bags to remove a long list of electronics before being screened by security agents. This is the start of the long, stressful, and annoying TSA process.
Students at Highland, East, and West now have a similar experience every morning when they walk into their school. Take the laptops out, walk through, and hope that the scanner doesn’t detect their dangerous school binders with their deadly metal rings which very threateningly hold students’ papers in one place. Stopping students every day with binders is obviously the best use of taxpayer money.
“I walk in with my backpack already unzipped on my stomach so it’s ready, and when it buzzes [after handing over my laptop], they open a couple zippers and let me go,” Sydney Backman, a Highland junior and BFFs with the security staff said. “They literally know me so well that they groan when they see me walk in. We’re buds.”
This is the unfortunate reality. The security staff has to stop so many students over required school supplies that they’ve begun fraternizing with them. That can’t happen! It breaks the TSA immersion! TSA agents are known for their cold, no-nonsense demeanor, which often leaves travelers stressed and worried that they might have accidentally packed a fully-loaded firearm in their luggage, despite not owning guns and never touching one in their life. If Highland’s security staff are trying to make the stressful passage through the front doors a little easier on students and less intimidating, then they need to go back to scary security personnel school, where TSA agents are top of the class.
Besides stopping the deadliest of school supplies, the weapons detection systems also force students to remove their laptops because the detectors see them as solid walls of a very dangerous and unknown material. This forces every single student walking in the building to remove their laptops every single time. Not a very efficient system, but at least scary laptops aren’t crossing the metal detectors. They’re only coming into Highland through the hands of the security staff, who personally take them from us, and then hand them back once we’ve cleared the detectors
Theoretically, the machine should be learning the difference between an assault rifle and a binder. So far, it doesn’t know the difference, even halfway through the school year. For something described as being virtually hassle-free, there’s a lot of hassles involved with the whole business.
Of course, an amazing solution to this whole thing would be to protect students from gun violence, something like the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, which expired in 2004, could help. But that’s a lot of work for the ancient people in Congress, so the next best thing is a TSA line outside of American high schools.
Now, stopping guns from entering high schools is not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a very good thing, right under not having school on Fridays and puppies. But unlike not having school on Fridays and puppies, it seems like the best way to stop guns from going into schools is recreating everyone’s favorite thing ever: TSA.