19 innocent children have had their lives stolen from them along with two of their devoted teachers. Each one represents a unique individual with a hopeful future and a violent trauma to families that will never, ever fully heal. I and so many others wish we could undo the Uvalde atrocity and the unending pain to the surviving families. We can't, but maybe we can do something to prevent this from happening in the future.

Astonishingly, we have this in common. Pro-gun and anti-gun Americans BOTH want to end mass shootings. We BOTH deplore the taking of innocent life. The question, and the division, is over how to accomplish a worthy goal.

The simplistic media conditioned answer is to make all the guns go away. Pass more laws, ban all guns, and when all the guns go away gun crime will simply disappear with it. Or sue gun manufacturers, or ban certain items that hardly anybody knows anything about so we can feel good about having "done something." After all, we must "do something." That usually means banning whatever is vaguely described by the latest media buzzword. There is a substantial amount of ignorance regarding firearms such that anything can be made to sound alarmingly sinister to the general public.

The media overall is consistently anti-gun and does obsess on particular types of firearms. I'm old enough to remember when the buzzword was "Saturday night special" to refer to mainly double action revolvers which the Dirty Harry movies helped sensationalize. In the '90s, it was the "semi-automatic handgun" that took center stage as the villain du jour. Almost nobody outside of gun owners knew what makes a semi-automatic a semi-automatic, nor did many know that such guns had been available since before 1900. The semi-automatic handgun scare may be the origin of the ongoing clip/magazine confusion. Right now, the so called "assault rifle," usually some form of AR, is in the spotlight and so much so that nobody shows much concern about the availability of AK variants. The attempts to define "assault rifle" legally, especially by those who have little to no knowledge of firearms, has produced some very convoluted results.

These reflexive responses demonstrate the media conditioning that has been ongoing since at least the '70s. How so?

In 1993, Timothy McVeigh murdered168 innocents in his bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Nobody called for a ban on fertilizer or rental trucks. After the 1991 attack on the World Trade Center, nobody called for a ban on vans or hydrogen which were used in that terrorist attack.

We're not the independent thinkers we imagine we are. We do respond to conditioning, and the relatively unique tendency to blame the instrument rather than the murderer in a gun crime is an indicator of that.

Think about it. In which other crime do we principally blame the instrument rather than the perpetrator?

I could say more here, but let's get back to the main point: what can we do that will actually help prevent future episodes like this from happening?

I would like to go back to the days of my elementary school experience when we never worried about these things. Guns were more available and more accessible in those days, by the way. We had an indoor rifle range in my high school where we often fired .22 caliber target rifles and sometimes without supervision. But those days are gone.

We need something more than a feel-good solution that ultimately leaves school children as exposed afterward as they were before. This does not mean we have to arm every teacher, especially since many teachers would be conscientious objectors to arming themselves. But since the reality is that somebody is going to attack somewhere sometime, we need to arm somebody who is trained to respond promptly.

There are teachers who have military and police experience along with others who would volunteer to be armed AND trained. Armed and trained security guards could and should be part of school staff. Potential shooters will look for vulnerable places, not places where they can be stopped promptly. An armed staff is a deterrent that would save lives. The Uvalde murderer was shot dead by a good guy with a gun. What if a good guy with a gun had been on scene much sooner?

This is the world we really live in today, and we need to take action to stop the next perpetrator rather than another useless, self-satisfying measure that will leave us mourning the next victims.

Komissar al-Blogunov wrote: ↑

5/26/2022, 10:53 am

Agreed.
 

When I went to high school it was not uncommon to look 'round the parking lot at school and see the occasional rifle or shotgun in the rear window gun rack of someone's pickup truck, especially during hunting season. We didn't shoot each other with them, and nobody stole them, either.

That wasn't that long ago.....what changed? Well, lots of things, none of which have anything to do with the inanimate metal objects commonly blamed as the cause of the tragedies we've been seeing.

Red Zeppelin wrote: ↑

5/26/2022, 1:04 pm

When I went to high school it was not uncommon to look 'round the parking lot at school and see the occasional rifle or shotgun in the rear window gun rack of someone's pickup truck, especially during hunting season. We didn't shoot each other with them, and nobody stole them, either.

That wasn't that long ago.....what changed? Well, lots of things, none of which have anything to do with the inanimate metal objects commonly blamed as the cause of the tragedies we've been seeing.

One of the rallying cries of the Legion of Hysterical Fools over the past few years has been to remove the police from the schools. They too point to the good old days when there was no cop on campus. They do not admit that the campus has changed, or that the students have changed.

Here is a modest proposal for the LHF: armed campus security that is not a division of local law enforcement. These campus guardians would not have police powers to deal with drugs, theft, unruly but unarmed students. They aren't detectives, they aren't narcotics officers, they aren't traffic cops in the parking lot. Their sole purpose is to protect the students from an armed attack, and to do so with extreme prejudice.

Ivan Betinov wrote: ↑

5/26/2022, 8:10 pm

One of the rallying cries of the Legion of Hysterical Fools over the past few years has been to remove the police from the schools. They too point to the good old days when there was no cop on campus. They do not admit that the campus has changed, or that the students have changed.

Here is a modest proposal for the LHF: armed campus security that is not a division of local law enforcement. These campus guardians would not have police powers to deal with drugs, theft, unruly but unarmed students. They aren't detectives, they aren't narcotics officers, they aren't traffic cops in the parking lot. Their sole purpose is to protect the students from an armed attack, and to do so with extreme prejudice.

Double Plus agreed.

Things sure have changed.

When I lived in Maine (sometime in the late 60's), my 7th grade teacher gave the class an assignment to stand before the class and demonstrate how to do something. I asked if I could demonstrate how to clean a shotgun. He said sure, and I did.

And double ditto the Colonel's posts.

It's taken me a couple of days to absorb all of this. This came across on my MeWe feed today and it hit home:

"A society that promotes mental illness is shocked when confronted by the results." —Anonymous

so much is wrong with our society and I've come to believe that part of it is drugs, especially those advertised on television, have much to do with it. Take a pill for this, take a pill for that, but we never get to the root causes of any of it. Also, the breakdown of the family has much to do with it as do many other things our country is currently struggling with. It seems that we've been at each other's throats since the 2000 election. I blame the left for most of it because they see government as a tool create their Utopia, but the right has some culpability as well. We should have stood our ground much earlier on important cultural issues as culture is everything.

My main disgust is with the vultures who immediately jumped on this tragedy to score political points and use it to further their agenda. The bodies were still warm when they started their sick campaign and to be honest, I have more sympathy for the mentally ill perpetrator than I do these rat bastard politicians.

Anyway, I agree with all of the sentiments written on the post. It's truly sad to see something like this happen. It should never happen, but then again, there are no guarantees at all in this life. There is no guaranteed security and my faith informs me of this. I do not fear it.

I remain
Dr. Chicago







 

Some excellent thoughts. I wonder how a disturbed high school dropout suddenly had thousands of dollars to spend on two AR-15s with ammo and body armor. Why the door to the school was propped open and why it took cops an agonizingly long time to finally take him down. Why the left has so steadfastly resisted and blocked efforts to secure the schools structurally and with armed security, like the kind the rich and powerful have at their schools. It is, after all, ALWAYS a good guy with a gun who stops these madmen and I say the sooner it’s done the better. Duh. And why the left believes we can control the bad guys by disarming the good guys. Unless I cynically start to believe the left really doesn’t want to solve this problem, it’s too valuable a campaign issue to lose. (coughcough ‘Beto O’Rourke’ coughcough)

Interesting to note as well, not a single part of the NRA’s School Shield proposal, made after the Sandy Hook tragedy, was implemented at Robb Elementary.. https://www.nraschoolshield.org/