Guns, Schools and Common Sense

I proposed a way to end school shootings in 2012.

In the wake of another horrific shooting of school children, the cries of “we must do something” are already being heard.

As I write this, I’m watching Biden speaking about it - it took less than two minutes for him to twist this tragedy into a political issue.

As many of us have said a thousand times, gun bans will not solve this problem. We have banned murder and the shooting in Uvalde, Texas today proves how well this works.

I can tell you another thing that is NOT a solution - passing Democrat pet legislation that does NOTHING to stop these shootings. In fact, their demands to erase the Second Amendment is prohibiting any sort of productive discussion about how to solve the problem of gun crime - not just school shootings, but gun crime in general.

They won’t agree to anything that doesn’t give them a political victory.

Maybe it is time we should consider going on offense and enforcing criminal law.

Maybe we should have spent 56 billion on our school security because it certainly appears Ukraine's security is more important to the President and Congress than our kids.

What follows is from something I posted back in 2012 in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy:

In our schools, the protection against the next Adam Lanza, Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold amounts to a sign that says “This Is A Gun Free Zone”.

There is a reason mass shootings don’t happen in police stations.

We shouldn’t be so ignorant or afraid to entertain the possibility that there will be another attempt to attack a school where a shooter knows that they will be met with token opposition at best. What would stop a terrorist attack in the mode of the Beslan School Massacre that occurred in North Ossetia (Russian Federation) in 2004 that left 380 people dead? Why is that so unthinkable in the US?

To my thinking – it isn’t. I am actually surprised that some insane terrorist group hasn’t tried to hit a “soft” target like a school or a shopping center yet.

We don’t need an arsenal at our schools. We don’t need a cadre of trained marksmen who can shoot a 2 inch group at a thousand yards. What we do need and can have are a few trained personnel with access to close order, defensive weapons like a couple of simple twelve gauge pump action or semi-automatic tactical shotguns and a will to use them.

While I am humbled and proud of the teachers in Newtown who shielded those innocent children with their own bodies, I am just a angry that they had absolutely no chance of survival without some way to fight back. Why would we ever want to place that kind of responsibility for human life into a person’s hands without at least assuring them that they can be something more than a sacrificial lamb?

Yet we place every teacher, administrator and school employee in that position every school day.

Tactical shotguns are not complicated. These are very simple weapons to use. You don’t need extensive training or expert marksmanship skills. If you have the skills to point and click on your computer, you have the skills to fire these weapons. You just point the open end at the target and pull the trigger.

These weapons are also very easy to secure while giving quick access to them. A lockable wall rack (no different than a wall case for a fire extinguisher), a biometric trigger lock and a chamber safety plug would allow three layers of security with the weapon in and out of the rack…and it would allow the weapons to be stored with rounds in the magazines to be chambered immediately with a quick rack or the push of a button to chamber a round and ready the weapon for firing. Once a round is chambered, then the integral safety built into every modern weapon provides protection against accidental discharge until the target is acquired.

Worried about lethality? Load the magazine with a round of rubber bullets or #9 shot before going to 00 buckshot. Give them one round to get their attitude adjusted and if they don’t pay attention, the next round will stop them altogether. I can tell you from my own experience with getting stung with #9 shot while dove hunting, even at about 40 yards out, it gets your attention pretty quickly.

Having a system like this installed in or near a school’s central office would also mean that public knowledge of the existence of the weapons would likely either 1) deter a shooter from attacking a school at all or 2) cause him to attempt to neutralize these weapons first and thereby focus the initial attack on the office instead of the classroom.

But this common sense and sensible approach does not conjure up the image of a reckless saloon of the 1800’s, complete with the mythical random gunplay and teachers strapped with Colt Dragoon’s, so we are left with the hyperbolic rantings of the handwringing, “oh, dear” political class and their knowing use of a paralyzing fear on the left of what they do not know or understand to achieve a political goal.

This is by no means an attempt to depersonalize these past school shooting tragedies, but if we are to have the debate about guns and schools, let’s at least be rational about it. This post is an attempt to cut through the banshee like screaming of the institutional and and reflexive “progressives” and their fear of guns – and people with knowledge of them. The true shame is that there is nothing but pure ignorance and stupidity that stops us from protecting our kids. We do so for fire protection, so why are we so willing to try to abrogate the rights of 312 million American citizens when the answer is self-evident?

Don’t kid yourself, it isn’t about Sandy Hook, Columbine or West End Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas – it is about a leftist paranoia over a Constitutional right that they simply don’t understand, used to protect against a threat that most of them do not comprehend.

A decade later, I still believe this will solve the problem, especially since there are retired military people begging to guard our schools.