There Is Only One Sure Way to Stop School Shootings

Not only is it hard to imagine the anger and grief the families of those killed by Nikolas Cruz are in at their Florida high school; it is impossible. We can sympathize and empathize, ache for their loss and be grateful that our own children were not there, and then feel guilty for being relieved that our children are safe. An event like this one focuses all parents and grandparents like laser beams on their own young people. That such a thing has happened yet again in our country is unacceptable, and yet it happened...again. Despite years of flashing neon lights that this boy was not only mentally ill, but potentially dangerous, he apparently had no formal record of mental illness. Even though he had been told he could not enter his school with a backpack and was later expelled, even though the police had visited his home thirty-nine times between 2011 and 2018, he was able to buy that AR-15 at age 18! Even though we have laws meant to prevent persons who are mentally ill from acquiring guns, this kid passed a background check! This is yet another catastrophic failure of a whole panoply of law enforcement agencies, social services, and school authorities.

Adding insult to injury, the FBI barely bothered to check out the YouTuber who reported Cruz's comment about becoming a "professional school shooter," and the bureau completely ignored a second, specific warning in January about his intentions to kill people. Both tips to the FBI included his full name. As Jeanine Pirro reported on her program, Judge Jeanine, there are only thirteen Nikolas Cruzes in the U.S.! The FBI did not even bother to do a database search, and now seventeen people are dead. Given the bare facts above, it is hardly surprising that the American people want to blame someone for the colossal failure of law enforcement. Mistakes were made, to put it mildly. But now many of the young survivors, their parents, and the usual suspects on the left are blaming Trump. Why? Because he supports the NRA? Because he did not immediately speak out about gun control? The young, traumatized survivors of the massacre, some of them, are already speaking out blaming Trump, as if he has been president for as long as they've been alive. "How dare you?" said one of them on Meet the Press because Trump truthfully tweeted that the Democrats had not passed any gun control measures when they had the majority in both houses of Congress. Trump also alluded to the FBI's failure to act on the tips they had received but ignored. How dare he tell the truth? These grieving young people are being manipulated by the adults in their lives to use the tragic deaths of their classmates for political purposes. Just as the school shootings in Columbine and Newtown became political footballs during which the victims were all but forgotten, we are reliving the same application of politics over common sense once again. And again, kids are the pawns in what the left sees as a game. It is no game. Israel learned the hard way. A terrorist school shooting forty years ago took the lives of over a hundred elementary school children. Since then, any school in Israel with a hundred students or more has armed guards and staff with concealed weapons. Why do we in America value our air travelers, our congresspeople, celebrities, the employees and contents of all public buildings, museums, etc. more than we treasure our schoolchildren? Given the world we now inhabit, it seems that our schools would and should have the best security available today. Those of us with little Ring doorbell cameras on our front porches have more security than most of our schools. There are over 300 million guns in America, 200 million of them legal. They are easy to buy anywhere for anyone who wants one. Most gun-owners are law-abiding citizens who purchase them legally and own them for self-defense purposes. They are used for protection far more often than reported by the anti-gun lobbies. The horrific murder rates in Chicago and Baltimore are not committed with legally owned firearms; both of those cities have the strictest gun laws in the nation. Most deaths by guns are self-inflicted. The anti-Second Amendment posture of the Obama administration was anathema to American citizens who revere the Constitution. Gun control, as Tucker Carlson reminded, is really people control. The first thing tyrants do is disarm their citizenry so they are defenseless. Which is why the proliferation of "gun-free zones" is suicidal on its face. Why did James Holmes shoot up that particular theater in Colorado? It was a gun-free zone, as are nearly all schools in the U.S. Mass murderers are shameless cowards; even if they expect to commit suicide by cop, they can only guarantee a mass murder in a gun-free zone. For members of the NRA who know how responsible that organization is, it is infuriating to see it used again and again as a whipping boy by the anti-gun left, whose members never bothered to investigate or report their true mission: responsible gun ownership, protection of the Second Amendment, and the right of American citizens to protect themselves. If America had long ago adopted Israel's commonsense approach and made schools secure and protected by well trained armed persons, it is quite likely that Columbine and Newtown would never have happened. One young ROTC student at Stoneman Douglas High School commented that Coach Feis, who died after he threw himself in front of a group of kids and saved their lives, could have taken the shooter out had he been permitted to carry a gun. He might well have saved many more lives had he been armed. The mental instability of the shooter, obvious for years but ignored by law enforcement, is at this point in time irrelevant. The local police and the FBI dropped the ball, and a tragedy ensued. The anti-gun lobby and these newly activist youngsters who think they can change the world by banning guns are irrelevant as well; the Second Amendment will never be overturned. There are already countless laws on the books to prevent people like Nikolas Cruz from getting his hands on a gun, but many people along the way did not do their job. Evil and insanity will always be with us. The only commonsense response as a nation is to remember that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Let the legacy of those young lives lost in Parkland be that we wake up and put an end to gun-free zones, especially at our schools. Let us protect our schoolchildren with the same fervor with which we protect those schlubs in Congress and all those Hollywood celebrities who never venture outside their homes without armed security. And make no mistake! Even if the Second Amendment were overturned and all civilian guns were confiscated (an impossible task), those folks would keep their armed guards. How about we value the lives of our schoolkids as much as members of Congress and all those celebs value their own?