In the aftermath of several high-profile school shootings, it’s not surprising that President Donald Trump has assembled a commission to look at how to make our schools safer.

However, the media is all upset over something Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has commented on. Namely what they won’t look at.

Amid several school shootings this year, some parents and students have begged for stricter gun laws while others simply asked to make schools less susceptible to guns.

President Donald Trump created the Federal Commission on School Safety to address these concerns, but yesterday Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said not only were no new gun policies coming, but guns wouldn’t be on the agenda.

The commission has a public listening session today and ABC News’ Erin Dooley, who covers the Education Department, breaks down what we should expect to hear from attendees.

Frankly, that’s the right call. Looking at guns in this context makes no sense. Of course, you’d expect a Second Amendment website to say that, but there are legitimate reasons why.

Guns Shall Be With You Always

No matter what you may want to believe, guns won’t be going away any time soon. Further, it doesn’t take an assault rifle to kill a pile of people. The Santa Fe killer used a pump-action shotgun and a revolver, two weapons that haven’t had people clamoring for bans despite him killing ten people. Even if new gun control laws were passed, it’s unlikely that school killers won’t be able to get their hands on guns.

The worst school shooting to date in the United States is still the Virginia Tech massacre. In that case, the killer used two handguns, not an AR-15 or other so-called “assault rifle.” All he needed were two handguns to kill 33 innocent people, a death toll that far exceeds Parkland’s and is only surpassed by Las Vegas.

In other words, no legitimate proposal has a hope in hell of passing that would prevent school killings. Not a single one. Instead, every proposal being bandied about is more about grandstanding or capitalizing on a handful of events rather than looking at anything that might make a difference in the long run.

Because of that, any gun control proposals considered would be, at best, a waste of time.

There Are Other Factor At Play

Despite their staunch desire to pretend that guns are just evil and make everything suck, there are a lot of other things that are at work in these cases. After all, why are so many of these shooters young males? Why are so many of them apparently on anti-depressants or other medications for psychiatric disorders? Why don’t these things seem to happen at inner city schools?

There are a whole lot of questions that no one can answer. We simply don’t know enough about the mechanisms at play in these shooters heads to begin to understand how to counter their insane desire to kill.

If the commission were to look at that, perhaps pushing for studies to understand the psychology of these kinds of killers, we can start to see patterns. Once we can identify those patterns, we may have a chance in hell of actually preventing these killings.

Perhaps we’ll find that the reason so many of these killers are on anti-depressants is that they were misdiagnosed and suffer from something the drugs made worse. Perhaps we’ll find that there was something in their childhood that set the stage for this later. Honestly, I don’t have a clue what we might find. What I do know is that if we don’t look, we’ll never find anything and these kinds of killings will continue, even if there were no more guns.

Why? I’m glad you asked, because that’s my next point…

Maniacs Don’t Need Guns To Kill

Recently, a man frustrated by his inability to get a girlfriend hopped into a van and killed ten people. Note that he killed as many people as the Santa Fe High School killer. He wasn’t the first to kill with such a weapon by any stretch of the imagination. On Halloween day, a terrorist in a rented truck killed eight people in New York.

Killers don’t need guns to murder a lot of people.

“Oh, but guns make it so you can kill so many more,” people will counter.

To that, I simply point out the 2016 truck attack in Nice, France. A terrorist in a truck killed 86 people and injured 434 others. That’s far more deadly than the Las Vegas massacre that used “assault rifles,” bump stocks and high-capacity magazines.

And that’s without bringing up Oklahoma City. Everything used in that attack is still available for sale, though with tighter restrictions. There’s nothing that will stop a determined attacker from blowing something sky high and killing a whole lot more people than anyone ever could with a firearm.

The truth is that killers don’t need guns. They need an opportunity and little else. They’ll seize that opportunity and unleash hell on Earth if they can, and so it makes a whole lot more sense to look at ways to approach school safety that doesn’t bank on them not getting hold of a weapon. By now, it should be clear that they still can.

So, with all that in mind, can you see why DeVos doesn’t want to put guns on the table? They’ll be nothing but a big distraction and look like an easy fix to a complex problem. By removing them from the conversation at the outset, the commission can focus on things that might be useful, and not just to school safety. Finding out what makes these maniacs tick could be beneficial in countering all manner of mass killings, for example.

That won’t stop the anti-gunners from trying to pretend that DeVos isn’t taking the situation seriously. For them it’s all guns, all the time. There’s no possible solutions outside of banning guns.

Meanwhile, they’ll ignore everything else written above.

That’s fine, though. You can’t reason with unreasonable people in the first place, so why bother?