Ron Seibel: In Bibb County, security check hits home
For the first time in the 20 years I’ve covered high school sports, I had to walk through a metal detector at a regular-season football game last week.
It didn’t seem right.
Fall Friday nights in most parts of the country are about taking in a local football game, for up-and-coming players to make a name for themselves while families enjoy a relatively inexpensive night out. It’s about students spending time together with their friends, band members and cheerleaders putting on a show while the football team puts out its best effort.
In other words, small-town, neighborhood stuff.
Yet, making my way into the Ed DeFore Sports Complex to cover the Lamar County-Howard game last week, everyone -- paying fans, pass holders and those attending the game in a working capacity -- were funneled through a single metal detector at the main gate.
I was told by someone working the gate that it was a practice the Bibb County School District adopted for basketball season last year, and that it was extending the practice to football this fall. Bibb County isn’t the first district to use them at football games; I saw at least two other high schools use them last year for football games, mainly for students.
At first, the presence of that didn’t sit well. As someone who is a strong believer in civil liberties, a scan of one’s person prior to entering any sort of facility causes unease. Yet they are becoming more common; NFL stadiums are in the process of installing walk-through metal detectors at every gate.
Many of us can relate to the slippery slope that airport security has become in recent years, thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s introduction of body scanners and invasive patdowns and the proliferation of power-tripping, bark-at-the-passengers Transportation Security Administration agents, all while making no attempt to sell the American people on the need for extra security.
Of course, the Ed DeFore Sports Complex isn’t an airport, and the security check there was much less invasive. It was like the security scan one goes through at the Bibb County Courthouse: metal out of pockets, walk through the detector, make sure it doesn’t beep.
If anything, the biggest flaw I saw from a procedural standpoint was the lack of cups to put pocket contents into. Only one was available for the roughly 2,000 or so fans who attended.
Will the walk-through metal detector be a deterrent to fans who don’t want to stir up trouble but yet don’t want to be inconvenienced? Maybe. The Bibb County School District’s football teams struggle to draw fans late in the season as it is, and this might add to the list of reasons why fans might not want to go.
Then again, as events like the Colorado movie shooting, the Charleston church massacre and this week’s on-air murder of a Virginia television crew demonstrate, evil can strike anywhere at any time. And it isn’t exactly easy to escape a facility with few exits, even if it’s as big as a football stadium.
Those events show how a few out-of-order minds can affect everyone. While I’d like to see laws like Florida’s Baker Act, which calls for an immediate three-day incarceration in a mental health facility for those who indicate they will harm themselves or others, be put into place on a wider scale, security checks provide an interim step to avoiding large-scale disaster.
Even after finding out what happened with that TV crew Wednesday, I’m still not a fan of having to walk through a metal detector to cover a high school football game. But until this country gets serious about treating the mental health issues that surround these mass shootings, I’m not going to be opposed to walking through those metal detectors, either.
Contact Ron Seibel at 744-4222 or rseibel@macon.com.
This story was originally published August 27, 2015 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Ron Seibel: In Bibb County, security check hits home ."