Recently, there was a shooting in a Seattle high school. It didn’t make national headlines because, while tragic, there was only one life taken.

It wasn’t a mass shooting.

But understandably, people in Seattle are talking about it plenty. They’re upset and for good reason.

The problem, though, is that city leaders are using this as an excuse to call for more gun control. They’re not alone, either.

Ingraham High School students have organized a walkout and rally during classes Monday morning, following a shooting that killed one student last week.

…

The students’ demands include having at least one mental health counselor per every 200 students in every school, increased de-escalation and anti-racism trainings for school security guards, and banning assault rifles.

There are problems with this, namely that there’s literally no gun control effort one can name that would have prevented what happened.

Washington state already has universal background checks and mandatory storage laws. Further, so-called assault weapons are already heavily restricted.

So just what gun control laws would have stopped this? The answer, of course, is nothing.

And what the hell does “anti-racism trainings for school security guards” have to do with an incident where one student shot another?

Now, would mental health counseling do any good? Since this doesn’t look like a mental health issue, I doubt it. Then again, calling for an assault weapon ban over an incident where a handgun was used doesn’t sound like it would do a whole lot of good, either.

Which raises plenty of questions.

None of these seem to involve what actually seems to have transpired. Not a single issue here has any bearing on the incident itself.

Instead, it looks pretty clear that this shooting has instead been turned into a pretext for pushing for completely different policies. “Sure, none of these would have saved this kid’s life, but who cares about that? We can push for anything we want now.”

That’s what it looks like from here, and it’s disgusting.

I believe in free speech, which means I must demand people be free to say things I disagree with. However, I also think that anyone who speaks is up for criticism. That includes anyone who uses the body of a dead child to try and push a political agenda, especially when it doesn’t seem to have literally anything to do with the kid’s death.

Seattle students can walk out if they want, but if they do, they’re just telling the adults around them just how easily they can be manipulated into pushing a given narrative.

Of course, then they wonder why so many of us oppose dropping the voting age.

It’s a mystery, I’m sure.

The truth is that Washington state has all the laws you could think of that are described as necessary to prevent a tragedy like this. None of them worked, as should be clear to everyone at this point. If they had, this wouldn’t be happening now.

If the argument had been, “this kind of thing happens but it doesn’t disprove the validity of these policies,” that would be one thing. I could accept that argument as perfectly valid and while I would disagree and argue against it, I could at least get it.

Instead, we’re seeing the reality of what happened in Seattle ignored so as to push policies that are completely irrelevant to the issue at hand.