ANALYSIS/OPINION:

When it comes to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the majority of Americans point fingers for the fault at the government, not the guns.

This is one small ray of sunshine out of a very, very dark well. It shows sanity can and does prevail, even when chaos and hot emotion swirls.

Rasmussen surveyed a field of 1,000 American adults and, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, found that 54 percent said it was the failure of government agencies to properly respond to the warning signs about shooter Nikolas Cruz that was the significant flaw that led to the killing of 17 school students and staffers.

That’s a pretty significant showing — especially when viewed against the comparatively small 33 percent who say weak gun control was the problem. Another 11 percent said something else.

And get this: Adults with kids in younger grades far and away blame government.

“Among Americans who have children of elementary or secondary school age, 61% think the government is more to blame,” Rasmussen wrote. “Just 23% of these adults fault a lack of adequate gun control more.”

That would seem to suggest the next generation of parents — the ones with the younger children in elementary levels of school — aren’t so enamored with the all-consuming, anti-gun tactics of the left, the ones that exploit every shooting to demand curbs on the Second Amendment.

And as far as the future of America goes — the Second Amendment, the notion of constitutional rights, the idea of self-reliance over a government of collectivist interests — that’s good news.

That’s a small ray of sunshine beaming from the very, very dark well called Stoneman Douglas.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.

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