Twenty years ago, the Kankakee County Courthouse was an open place.

The courthouse then was sort of a community gathering point. You went there not only to defend or to prosecute a case, but for a thousand other reasons. Get a marriage license. Negotiate a contract. Just talk politics.

Then, a conscious decision was made to begin to shut the courthouse down to the public. A number of services were moved out. Entrances were closed off. Today, if you want to get into the Kankakee County Courthouse, you can only go in one door — on the north side. You wind your way through a roped maze. You have to remove all metal objects and walk through a scanner as an armed deputy watches. There’s also a deputy at the south entrance, just in case someone tries to get in.

Once inside, every active courtroom has a bailiff, whose job it is to help keep order. The exterior walls of the courthouse are limestone blocks. Today’s courthouse resembles a fortress. It’s manned like a fortress. It’s nearly inconceivable that someone would mount an armed attack on the building. If they did, they would be put down in a minute.

In other words, a conscious decision has been made — and real dollars spent — on courthouse security. It was a decision, a real decision. We note, too, that some, but not all, of the residential blocks within a mile of the courthouse are not among the safest in the area.

The irony is, while courthouse security has been amped up, school security has not. Like the courthouse, schools are “weaponsfree” zones (so much so that a child with a folded pocketknife, once a staple of normal boyhood, can get expelled).

But the weapons-free zone in most schools basically is on the honor system. Some schools, notably Kankakee High, have a police presence. Most do not. Nothing seems more futile to us then to ask an unarmed school official to try to take a weapon away from an armed assailant. It’s not something we would want to try.

Schools, too, like the courthouse, can be locked down, but their design is nothing like those limestone blocks. There usually are low windows, and lots of them.

The answer, we think, is to consider putting a trained guard in every school. Will this cost? Sure.

But society every day makes decisions what it wants to guard.

A conscious decision was made to guard airports.

A conscious decision was made to guard courthouses.

You can freely walk up the steps to the Lincoln Monument. You can’t get into the Statue of Liberty without passing through a detector. We make decisions and assign costs.

Consider, too, how schools have changed.

Fifty years ago, schools had basic classroom teachers. In the years since, real and discovered needs, fueled by educational research, have added vast numbers of specialists. Bilingual classes. Gifted classes. Speech therapy. Behavioral therapy. Reading specialists. Individual aides. Pre-school. These all are things that have been added, often at substantial costs, because of the determination to improve education.

So why not a guard?

A lot of people will use the latest tragic school shooting as a lever to reopen the discussion on gun control. There will be a lot of opinions there. But a gun is only one weapon. A trained professional can combat not only an attack with a gun, but a thousand other situations.

Weapons will change. Someone killed in an explosion or a fire is just as dead. You need a real guard to be one step ahead of the potential attacker.

So when you get right down to it, how much is safety worth?

— The Kankakee (Ill.) Daily Journal