Lately, I've been talking an awful lot about kids and their safety. Not so much here, but over at our sister site, Townhall. This stems from a case where YouTuber AngryCops, aka Buffalo SVU Det. Richard Hy blew the whistle on how the schools there were stonewalling police on allegations of abuse. I've written a lot about it there, this is just the most recent piece with links to most of the rest of it.

And honestly, it kind of ties into what we do here, though not in the most obvious of ways. You see, after every high-profile school shooting, some anti-gunner stands up and talk about how we need to take our children's safety seriously, which invariably means passing some degree of gun control.

Six years ago, Cam talked about this when Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called for gun control.

This goes back to something I wrote about last week; the fact that gun control groups (and supporters like Weingarten) are actually instilling fear even while they bemoan it. According to Gallup, about one in five students expressed concern about their safety to parents in 2018, which is near an all-time high. But the truth is schools are safer now than they were a generation ago. You’ll never hear a gun control supporter like Randi Weingarten tell a student that fact, any more than Weingarten would ever admit that these students are more likely to have teachers sexually abusing or harrassing them than a classmate try to kill them.

I can find Randi Weingarten’s press release in support of “universal background checks” on the American Federation of Teachers website, but I can’t find a single word of condemnation for the hundreds of educators arrested in the past few years for sex crimes against students. Will Randi Weingarten have anything to say about the teacher in Kentucky charged with rape last week? How about the Iowa teacher accused of preying on a student?

A friend of mine reminded me about this piece when I talked about the Buffalo situation on Facebook, and it got me thinking a bit. Weingarten is still the head of AFT. But this is old. It's from six years ago. A lot has changed, hasn't it?

Well, sure, let's look at some statistics for a moment.

In recent years, 51 in 100,000 students will experience a school shooting, or 0.051 percent.

But a 2023 report found that 11.7 percent of recent graduates report some incident of sexual misconduct by a teacher.

I mean, even if gun control could do everything proponents promise--which it never does, mind you--we'd still provide more safety for our kids by removing teachers from the classroom.

Now, let's talk a bit about Buffalo again, because that's something that's not getting unstuck from my craw anytime soon. If we assume these statistics are evenly distributed across schools as a whole, then 11.7 percent of Buffalo Public Schools students are dealing with this kind of stuff from their teachers. Yet the allegations by Hy aren't so much about teachers doing inappropriate things, but parents or other students. The schools are just trying to cover them up. Those still happen, as I noted at Townhall.

So that means even more students are impacted by this, which the schools are trying to cover up.

That means students are even more likely to face some kind of sexual impropriety than be shot. However, Buffalo school students took part in the post-Parkland student walkout for gun control with the support of the staff. Somehow, I don't see them being so open to a walkout to stop the schools from covering up sexual assaults.

Our kids matter, folks.

Their safety is important to me.

My own kids are just one more reason why I own firearms. It's why I keep abreast of various threats to children and do my best to teach them to be safe.

But I'm done having people lecture me about keeping kids safe when they're doing nothing to stop the actual threats to our children in schools.