Following Uvalde, a lot of people in education are thinking long and hard about school shootings. That’s certainly understandable, too. After all, this just happened, so it makes sense to be preoccupied with it.

However, what we need are people who will think rationally, not jump up and down screaming for gun control like the Wisconsin state school superintendent:

The key to making schools safe from mass shootings is reducing access to guns, said Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly. Underly spoke about school safety Monday on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show.”

She said efforts to increase security on campuses or limit access to schools cannot completely protect kids without also addressing gun control.

“Rather than say we need to do more to defend our schools, I think we need to protect our children by really examining and changing our access to guns,” Underly said.

Her comments came the day after the release of an assessment of the law enforcement response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May. That shooting left 19 students and two teachers dead. The report was sharply critical of the delayed police response, but it also found that even if police had acted more quickly, many of the children could not have survived their injuries from the gunman’s AR-15-style rifle.

Why would you not want to focus on defending schools?

No, honestly, why?

Oh, I get that Underly believes we should restrict access to guns, but there’s a problem with that. After all, we’ve looked at a number of school shootings over the years. The killers in these instances generally are able to either pass a background check or are more than willing to steal a gun.

As such, just how do you propose “changing our access to guns” in any way that will stop these maniacs from getting them?

Especially when you consider the Bruen decision was just passed down that laid down the law on how the Second Amendment can be restricted.

So that means there’s not much lawmakers could do to restrict access to firearms, which means defending schools is the only option actually on the table.

And, frankly, that works no matter what laws you put in place.

After all, let’s say an assault weapon ban was in place and the ubiquitous AR-15 simply didn’t exist–a ban won’t actually work like that, but let’s pretend it would for the sake of argument. Would that be enough to keep our schools safe?

Not really.

After all, plenty of mass shootings have taken place with the bad guy using a handgun. Perhaps most famously is the shooting at Virginia Tech, which still holds the record as the worst school shooting in US history.

But if schools were better defended, it wouldn’t matter. No matter how a bad guy got a gun, he’d still have to face a very tough target, one he might not even be able to gain access to in the first place.

Defending schools makes sense because it works regardless of whether a bad guy can get a gun or not. Pie-in-the-sky ideas like gun control–something that has never actually reduced violent crime in the first place–won’t accomplish anything except continue to allow evil people access to children they can slaughter for attention.