Four years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the Hartford Courant issued forth a sappy, impotent editorial that “On Dec. 14, We Remember That Love Wins.”

It’s a lie. A sappy, muddle-headed platitude justifying impotence and a culture of weakness that still refuses to do what is necessary to make our children’s schools safer against people with hate-filled souls who only find pleasure in destruction.

The love that Nancy Lanza had for her evil son did nothing to calm the monster that he was. He murdered her all the same, then stepped around her bloody corpse to get to her gun safe and equip himself for an execution of innocents.

Love didn’t stop him from shooting his way through school with laughably weak security. Love didn’t slow his advance as he blasted his way through faculty, staff, and terrified students in classrooms where doors don’t have locks, and there was no where to run or hide. Love didn’t get the police there in time to do any good at all.

He finally killed himself out of boredom and a sick sense of accomplishment 4 minutes and 44 seconds before officers arrived. He could have killed another 26 innocent souls. There was nothing there to stop him.

In most schools, there still isn’t.

Four years after Sandy Hook, we’ve learned nothing.

NOTHING.

Your average elementary school in the United States is still a soft target. You can still stroll through the front door at any time of day and go to the office to check out your child, can you not? For those schools that feature a simple remote locking system where a staffer has to buzz you in, how easy and common is it for someone to kindly hold the door open for the stranger behind them?

If you feel cold and hollow inside considering the possibilities, you should. Almost anyone can walk into almost any elementary, middle, or high school at any time, and still do almost anything, at any time of day.

Our children are still soft targets, while the soft, mewling pukes at editorial desks and the crisply-tailored cowards who hide behind armed guards in state houses and federal capitols still refuse to listen to the advice of professionals who have taken the grim responsibility upon themselves to figure out how monsters think and act in order to defeat them.

“We’re not ready.”

We weren’t ready in 2012.

We weren’t ready in 2014.

We’re not ready now.

People with evil hearts can still breach the perimeter of almost any school in the nation in seconds. Once inside, there are very few things to stop them from carrying out another Sandy Hook, or worse.

The same soft-handed, weak-willed souls bleating that “love wins” continue to ignore the professionals who have freely offered advice on how to harden our schools with better security infrastructure, technology, personnel, training, and policy.

These cowards softly weeping that “love wins” still resist putting armed school resource officers at every level of school, despite these officers stopping mass shootings and stabbings in high schools from occurring on numerous occasions. In most parts of the nation they stick their heads in the sand and insist that to themselves that “it can’t happen here.”

“Again,” you mean?

They still resist allowing interested school staff and faculty obtain specialized training and arming themselves as an additional line of defense against the evil that lurks out there, waiting, despite research from the Homeland Security Institute which shows that a layered approach with armed guards and concealed carriers give our children the best chance of surviving the next attack.

Is it going to take a Beslan for you fools to realize how wrong you are? Must it take a Day of Wrath?

Do we need hundreds of young corpses instead of dozens stacked in morgues to make you realize that empty platitudes don’t work?

If you really love your kids, you’ll do what it takes to force your leaders to harden our school campuses.

If you really love your kids, you’ll insist that your school boards implement the security measures developed by men who are masters in the art of violence on the side of good who want nothing more or less than that their children are well-protected alongside your own.

The ripping anguish of regret isn’t what I would want for any of you. I want you to to have courage. I want you to love your children enough to listen to the professional hunters of bad men who know how to defeat bad people before they can harm our children, instead of just faking tears afterward like the craven politicians pretending to care so they can secure your vote.

Memory candles and platitudes and speeches aren’t going to stop the next monster in a human suit.

It’s going to be a brave soul with a gun that stands between life and death for our kids.

If you lack the courage to put these protectors in place, then you’ve already decided that love, real love, isn’t going to win.