Gun policies need to be re-aimed

After a week of public furor, the case of a young girl with a hunting rifle was resolved wisely by Columbia Falls school trustees.

They met Monday and Demari DeReu was allowed back into school on Tuesday without an expulsion on her record. Case closed and resolved amicably.

The Columbia Falls case, thanks to an Internet-fueled campaign, attracted national attention and DeReu became a poster child for all manner of guns-and-freedom causes.

But hers was hardly an isolated incident.

In the last three years, Montana schools have reported 79 gun violations; 13 of those were in Flathead County and five were heard by the same Columbia Falls school board that decided DeReu’s punishment would be capped at suspension.

Bigfork had a nearly identical case this year with the same resolution; one gun incident in Whitefish was resolved without even reaching the school-board level.

One complicating factor in all of this is a tangled web of federal law, state law, school board policies, and recommendations from the Montana School Boards Association that deal with how to deal with youths, guns and school.

The lessons to be learned from this incident are many:

— School administrators need to exercise discretion — or at least be allowed the chance at that discretion by school-district policies and state law — so inadvertent incidents do not become major conflagrations in the public eye.

Kalispell schools allow such discretion; other schools do not. The much-ballyhooed Columbia Falls case should be the impetus for all schools to consider how to tweak their policies to deal with the realities of Montana as a hunting state.

— Teenage hunters need to be aware that there may be consequences even for innocently leaving weapons in vehicles.

— State law, which apparently and unfortunately is stricter than the federal guns-at-school statute, perhaps needs to be revised so that school officials aren’t hemmed in by rigid policies when they encounter situations such as the one in Columbia Falls.

We don’t aim to make schools into gun-toting zones but merely recognize the reality that in a state such as Montana with a strong gun culture and tradition, harmless accidents — and many of the situations with kids having unloaded guns in their vehicles are just that — should not require cumbersome responses by school bureaucracy.