If we never saw a school shooting more often than once a decade, that would be far too often. The truth is that our schools should be safe places for our kids, and they're not.
The one thing I agree with anti-gunners on is that we should change that. We can't, though, and because they won't let us.
That was a point recently made by my friend and RedState alumni Kira Davis over at her Substack.
Why are these insane shooters always so attracted to schools? The answer is obvious. They are not safe. They are vulnerable.
Targeting something like a bank or even an average corporate office comes with risk. Banks and offices have security officers, police presence, closed circuit monitoring and more. Pulling off a mass casualty event in an area like that comes with a lot of hazards.
We use security to protect our money. We use security to protect our workplaces. We don’t use a standard security protocol for our children in their schools.
It makes no sense until you frame it from the perspective of politics. The progressive left does not want any other alternatives to work. They want to be right and that is it. Increased security at our schools is a solution. When we solve things, the progressives can no longer use those issues as bludgeons for their own agendas and entertainment. Making our schools safer means less possibility for events like the tragedy in Wisconsin. As perverse as it sounds, it also means fewer soap boxes for the progressive left to stand on and demand we rescind our second amendment rights.
Our children deserve the same protection at schools that CEO’s and bank workers get. It doesn’t seem like a controversial stance to take. The most valuable asset we have as people and as Americans are our children. We should treat them accordingly. Yet, leftists continue to force them to be at risk simply to satisfy their own political goals.
Now, I know there are pro-gun Democrats. I know there are some who actually favor some of these same steps, who recognize that while we might not like the idea of metal detectors at schools or armed police officers assigned to watch over our children, the harsh reality is that something really does need to be done, even if we're not fond of the options.
Yet it needs to be something that doesn't actually infringe on people's rights, even the rights of students. Metal detectors don't because students aren't allowed to climb in through the windows anyway. Just putting a metal detector at the door doesn't prevent them from walking through--it also catches weapons other than guns, for the record.
School resource officers come with other problems, such as them enforcing the law and making arrests when, in the past, discipline might have been less extreme, but when there's an office there with the will to act--an important component, as we saw in Parkland--then lives can be saved.
Following Parkland, though, a lot of us talked about hardening schools. We wanted to make it so much more difficult for a mass killer to enter the building and start taking innocent lives. My thoughts were that even if we enacted all the gun control in the world and somehow it actually worked when it never has before, some dipstick was going to get a gun anyway. We've seen school shootings all over the world, after all, so it just seemed to me like it was a plausible point we could come to an agreement on.
It wasn't.
As Kira noted, the other side wasn't interested in the least. They didn't want a solution, they wanted to be right.
And our kids are the ones paying the price.
