Failed safeguards: To me, this is the one to focus on, because it dispenses with the “whys.” It cuts through the debate. Whatever the “why,” just stop it from happening. Iron Dome doesn’t care
why a missile was fired.
Ever since Oct. 1, 1997, when vice principal Joel Myrick stopped the Pearl, Miss., high school shooting by holding his Colt .45 to the teen shooter’s
head, the second best way to stop a school shooting has been well-known. The first best is prevention. The Pearl shooter had leaked his plan in advance to his friends (as 48 percent of shooters
do), but they told no one.
Armed professionals on campus and tips to law enforcement are not panaceas, but they’re the intelligent response of a society dealing with a phenomenon with no single cause (and after Covid, leftists have totally lost the right to say “we can’t terrorize schoolchildren just to keep them safe”). Still, armed guards and law enforcement tip lines don’t work when the armed professionals bumble like the Keystone Cops and the FBI puts shooting threats on the back burner as it devotes its resources to politicized witch hunts.
As we marvel at the police clusterfuck in Uvalde, remember that during Columbine, cops waited two hours before they entered the building where the shooting took place, and it took another hour to find the killers dead in the
library. Following the outcry over the slow response, police nationwide were supposed to train regularly for such shootings. Apparently, the Uvalde cops did
train, but poorly. If every police department in the country can be monitored for “diversity,” perhaps the quality of school shooting response training can be monitored too.
Also, it’d be great if the FBI could pause the partisan political ax-grinding for at least a few minutes a day to follow up on shooting tips.
And maybe we should stop arguing about the “whys,” because while they all may be to some degree valid, none is a magic bullet.
Pushing ideologically pleasing fixes makes for some damn fine tweeting…but in terms of real-world helpfulness, it’s of limited value.