Well, the know-it-all media has, once again, missed the point of what our President is saying about school safety. All they are doing is poking holes in a plan without actually looking at the far-reaching program he is offering to make our schools safer.
So, let’s look at what President Trump really wants, and how much better we all will be under the Trump reforms.
He has correctly identified the core problem of school shootings - mental illness. And he identified the second problem - not enough well-trained and well-armed teachers to take down any madman who shows up with a gun.
Now there may be a couple of problems with his plan to eliminate those problems, but I am sure they can be dealt with easily. Let’s take a look.
First, he is absolutely right. Anyone who goes and shoots up a school killing dozens of innocent children has to be crazy. So, anyone who is absolutely crazy has to be stopped from buying a gun.
And, he was right to let us know that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies missed signals that this latest shooter - we need not give him any more publicity - was going off the deep end.
Now that one is easy to fix. Any time there is a signal that someone may be getting too violent, officials should immediately make sure they can not buy a gun, and that any guns they already have should be taken away, at least until they are judged to be mentally stable.
What? You don’t know that the only way to do those things is to have someone judged mentally incompetent and an immediate threat to themselves or someone else. It is called involuntary confinement, and it can only be ordered by a court.
Now, our liberal courts ruled many times that people can say many nasty things on the internet and not be arrested. Something about the First Amendment. They have also ruled that having six or seven rifles in your house is not - in itself - grounds for having those guns taken away. Something about the Second Amendment.
No. Under the law, you actually have to do something. Like get into a fight and hit somebody. Or have a psychiatric evaluation that you are not competent. Just like the court did to Santa in Miracle on 34th Street.
So, here’s what we should do. Bigly, and right away. Anyone who is arrested for assault or domestic violence - or for any other crime in which force or intimidation was used - has to have all their guns taken away immediately. They can always go to court later and prove the initial charge was dismissed, or show other mitigating circumstances to get their guns back. That is, as I understand it, the heart of the Trump plan.
The First Problem
Now, it may take a while. According to FBI and Department of Justice statistics, there were 386.3 homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults per 100,000 people in the U.S. last year, or nearly 800,000 total crimes. Now, even if you figure that some people never get caught, and others commit a lot of crimes, that’s still an awful lot of people to track down.
And we also know that people can change over the years. That someone who is perfectly sane today may become a real threat to our safety a few years from now. So, everyone who owns a gun will have to be examined every two or three years, proving they are not going to become a menace to society. If they disagree, they can always go to court to get their weapons back.
See, our President is bringing gun control back to our nation. Let’s praise him for doing something that Hillary could never do, or even Paul Ryan.
Now, Let’s Get Serious.
Letting teachers carry concealed weapons in school as a way of stopping a madman with an assault rifle isn’t really smart. For lots of reasons. Here are some obvious ones.
1 - When the alarms sound and kids are hiding under their desks, the armed teacher will go out and, possibly, find someone in the hall with a gun. Is it another teacher? Is it a plainclothes cop? Is it someone who will turn and shoot at them? And, they turn. So, what to do? Live or die?
2 - When someone calls the police to save all the kids, they arrive. Well-trained SWAT teams, if they are available. Other police if they are not. Now, SWAT teams - let’s forget the TV shows for a minute - are really good at what they do because they train over and over again, knowing how to go into a room and scan for a threat. They work together so often that each member of the team can count on the others, everybody is covering everyone else’s back. And so, they break in a door, see 25 kids hiding in fear under their desks, and a man or a woman with a gun in their hand. Expect anything good to happen?
3 - Let’s assume that the shooter is crazy, but not stupid. Let’s also assume they are suicidal and don’t mind showing the world how badly they were treated. So, what to do when you break into that school or library or any other place you can find a lot of kids? Well, of course, you shoot all the adults first.
4 - Now, let’s assume that all the teachers are trained well and get the time off to deal with emergency drills, and go to the firing range a couple of times a year. And let’s assume that we have bricked up all the windows in the school building and taken all the other steps to turn it into a hard target - the kind that terrorists drive up to with a truck bomb. Well, are we safe yet? Nope. After all the kids still have to arrive at school each morning and leave at the end of the day. And, they are all coming and going in very thin-skinned school buses.
Now, we have just two other things to consider before agreeing to give those well-trained teachers a few bucks to make the school safe.
First, you need to have all the students pass through a metal detector to get into school each day and have all their backpacks checked for weapons. Say it will take 30 seconds or so for each student. That’s two a minute, or 120 an hour. Now, say there are 1,200 students in the school. That means you have to set up 10 screening stations to get all those kids into the building each day.
And That's Not All
It means the school buses have to start rolling an hour earlier, and the parents have to get their children ready an hour earlier. And all those soccer moms you see on the street with their little ones at 6 a.m. waiting for the bus will be there at 5 a.m.
Now, we have to have the teachers and the aides in school an hour early, because all those students who are filtering in - one every 30 seconds at each of those 10 screening stations - will have to be supervised.
Hey, maybe all the teachers will pitch in. We could give them a couple of bucks. Heck, they might even find someone to watch their own kids as they wait on the street for a school bus at 5 a.m.
And now, the final problem. (Actually, I don’t know if it really is a final problem. My list is still only half-baked.)
Donald Trump has probably never fired a gun. Certainly, his bone spurs kept him out of the army, and I never saw a picture of him at a shooting range. Certainly, he has never walked a beat at night, or responded to a domestic violence call or had to go to a bar and break up a fight. That’s the kind of thing real police do. They also go to funerals.
Under President Obama, our nation saw an average of 135 police killed on duty each year, which was less than the average of 162 in the eight previous years. Of those 135 deaths, 42 involved firearms. Accidents were the biggest cause of fatalities. Always have been.
Now my point is that walking around with the power of life and death in your pocket - and that is exactly what a gun is - makes you see things a little differently. Police who walk through a neighborhood learn very quickly for signs of danger, the same way they look for signs of drug dealing or someone who is drunk or high and is walking into heavy traffic.
So, let’s take the teacher and send him down a hall in his school to break up a fight. With a gun in his pocket. And a crowd of kids egging one of them on, just to show the teacher who really runs the school. The teacher with his hand in his pocket, on the gun. And, then the pushing starts.
Hey, that’s probably worth a couple of bucks. The teacher can save up and go to a group therapy session and explain how they are having trouble working with their students, finding time to give extra attention and understanding inside the classroom and trying to make life and death decisions in the hallway outside.
Of course, they could just wait for one of the kids in the hall to take out a gun and start shooting, but - as we have already learned - adults will be the first target.
Gee, I wonder if there is a simpler way to keep school kids from being killed with assault rifles. Maybe the NRA has a booklet on that.
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