Unfortunately, I must weigh in among hundreds of thousands of others in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas school shootings, but this is not a catastrophe impulse; rather a measured attempt to illuminate what I see as missed by others. Outrage at guns is of course widespread immediately following a mass casualty tragedy. Its axiomatic when there is dozen points of failure in the leadup to the school shooting, a majority will choose one, guns of course, drive it into the ground, and neglect all the others. This is idiocy that no longer masks an opportunistic political agenda.
In the case of Texas shooting, what were all those other points of failure you ask?
- Another raging nihilistic young man slipped through the cracks, was known to be bullied, marginalized, and dropped out without any vigilance from his school. Some nick-named him ‘school shooter’. Where were the adults?
- Based just on the fact that he lived in a house with a felon family member, his background check should never have been ok’d. Why was it?
- I don’t believe a mentally disturbed person (18 years old or 80 years old), should be granted a gun purchase. While I’m an ardent Second Amendment advocate, I’m not a gun anarchist. I believe guns should be regulated to exclude the criminal, disturbed, and mentally incompetent. In a post a couple years ago, I suggested that guns should be regulated at the local level. No state or federal agency can know what a local sheriff can potentially know about at-risk individuals. There is no system in this world that could assure that level of intelligence at a state or federal level. In many jurisdictions, local law enforcement has a presence at schools, especially high schools. If properly integrated, there should never be a case where a local young man is deemed a risk and is allowed to legally purchase a gun. A flow of information protocol would have to be established.
- At the same time, firearms should be made more available and usable to any that would use them to protect themselves and others around them against deadly threats. Let’s be clear on something; if the Uvalde police – in a town and state that is generally supportive of law enforcement – could not protect the kids of that school, everyone is at the mercy of anyone that decides to initiate a mass casualty event. Law enforcement may not arrive and intervene until it’s substantially over.
- Many are calling for a gun prohibition to 18-year-olds. Tell that to those that went to Viet Nam or Iraq or Afghanistan at that age. A generation ago, no one feared their teen population going postal. The only way to regain that is to reward responsible mentoring in firearm use and forbid use by the wayward. This can only be assured locally.
- In Uvalde Texas, the school doors were not only unlocked but also open. This is inexcusable for any school system for many different threats. If your local school has unlocked doors tomorrow morning, a hundred laws will not prevent a repeat tragedy. The Senate Republicans proposed a bill that would address procedures like this that failed. Chuck Schumer immediately shut it down which only proves that he only has one goal, to dance on the graves of those kids to get to your responsibly owned firearms. But I have would take this back one big step. What TF has the U.S. Department of Education done with their annual budget of $68 billion dollars? Why would they need any more money to secure the most rudimentary planning and procedures to secure the safety of our kids?
- Schools that do not have proper architectural features to stop, evaluate, isolate, and filter visitors or intruders should also now be considered negligent. This applies to all entrances all the time. They could learn from airports which have systemized these processes on a large scale and suffered no similar trends in violent penetration. At the end of the day, locks, strengthened glass, and video cameras are dirt cheap relative to the whole school. Should there be a federal campaign to educate or replace school boards, capital improvement specialist, security consultants, and architects that are negligent about these features?
- We should certainly turn out any federal and state legislators that denied funds for law enforcement to have an expanded presence at schools. There is a cruel irony that AOC for example, has more firepower protecting her gun-hating ass than most any school in this country.
- The police response to the Uvalde school shootings should now be considered grossly negligent. When yet again, a shooter is having their way with the lives of unarmed and unarmored children and law enforcement is worrying about whether their swat team has arrived or whether they’ll get shot, that is itself criminal. This should not reflect every police department because they’re all different, but every armed officer should be trained and ready to act as a SWAT team from the moment they arrive on the scene. Every squad car should have tactical gear and weaponry available, and officers trained for immediate response. In the case of Uvalde, they will be on some level of trial even after the gun grab lobby goes back under a rock.
- The State of Texas, God love-em, they screwed up. For a state that is at least nominally conservative run, second amendment and law enforcement friendly, they failed on all of these points. The bad guy had the gun and no one else did until too late. It may as well had been New York or California. While I would hope they’d reject the gun-grab lobby, they have serious work to do to remedy their failures. My list here would be a good starting point.
The point of this is that guns are only a small segment of what went wrong and yet that is ALL that most liberal progressives will focus on (but assume that the far fringe left is actually armed). If you need further education against the taking away of Second Amendment rights, take a look here.
…They get bitter, they cling to gun control or anti-religion or antipathy to people who don’t conform to them or anti-conservative sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.