The recent increase in on school shootings should disturb everyone. These are our children, our future. So let’s look at school shootings and the truth about teenage safety . . .
Guns are inanimate objects. If we’re really worried about our teenagers’ safety we’d ban another inanimate object: cell phones. Check out these the stats [via edgarsnyder.com]:
– 11 teens die every day as a result of texting while driving.
– According to an AAA poll, 94% of teen drivers acknowledge the dangers of texting and driving, but 35% admitted to doing it anyway.
– 21% of teen drivers involved in fatal accidents were distracted by their cell phones.
– Teen drivers are 4x more likely than adults to get into car crashes or near-crashes when talking or texting on a cell phone.
Texting while driving injuries and deaths are so routine that the mainstream media pays zero attention to the subject.
As do hundreds of thousands of teens. Because guns are scarier than phones and cars. Teens don’t look at their phone and think “this thing could kill me.” The thought process they apply to firearms.
Adults are supposed to be more responsible, more rational. For the same of argument let’s leave the more lethal threats to our children and examine the school shooting problem like adults, responsibly and rationally.
If you truly want to address violence directed at our children you have to discuss mental health.
The vast majority of school shootings begin — and end — with mental illness. Lanza, Holmes, Cruz were all school shooters whose serious mental illness was known to parents, neighbors, administrators, classmates, therapists and yes, the police. And yet nothing was done to remove them from society, to protect them and our children.
Gun violence restraining orders are designed to remove guns from identified threats — as if killers can’t get guns elsewhere (Lanza shot his mother and stole her guns) or use other methods to kill (the Columbine slaughter was a bomb plot).
You want to talk about safety from school shooters? Identify the threat and defuse it. Not disarm. Defuse. As in remove the threat. Isolate it. Contain it. There has to be due process, of course. But something has to be done.
Don’t get me wrong: the rash of school shootings has forced parents, neighbors, administrators, classmates, therapists and the police to become proactive. But again, “see something, say something” has to become “see something, do something.” Something effective.
But we can’t ignore on the other end of the threat, when our safety systems fail. Because all systems fail. [ED: gun control.] The answer: eliminate schools as “gun free zones” to provide immediate and effective countermeasures.
Truth be told, you cannot rely on armed law enforcement to counter a lethal threat in every school. That’s mathematically and financially impossibility. Where will they come from, who will pay for them and how will the vacuum created affect the very communities of these schools?
Equally, every poll shows that the vast majority of teachers don’t want to carry a gun in school. Nor do they want their fellow teachers or administrators armed.
As a firearms instructor I can assure you: anyone who doesn’t want to be armed shouldn’t be armed.
As for anti-gun teachers banning willing colleagues from being armed, no. Teachers and administrators who want to be armed to defend innocent life should not have their right to keep and bear arms infringed by antis. That’s counter-productive. And unconstitutional.
Former USAF Officer Bill Stein nails it:
I have the right to speak freely in the public square. Someone hearing that speech does not infringe on their rights. They have the right to listen to something else. They have the right to leave the area in which I am speaking (assuming it is a public place). They even have the right to express a differing opinion. But they do not have the right to silence my speech simply because they don’t like it, or they don’t want to hear it.
Substitute the right to keep and bear arms for the right to speak freely, and there you have it.
The bottom line: unless we address the issues discussed here, unless we identify and remove dangerous individuals from society, unless we have a fail-safe measure in place when that doesn’t work, we’re not serious about wanting to protect our children. In case you didn’t know.