More School Shootings, More Political Posturing

Once more we have witnessed the murders of school children, and once more we have seen the politicization of this horrific event. I can’t say which national political party politicizes events like the one in Florida, but it contains people of a leftist bent, much like the party of Bernie Sanders, whose dedicated follower shot Republicans assembled to play a baseball game, and nearly killed Steve Scalese, the Republican Majority Whip. But who in their right mind could call that a politically motivated attack? Hey, here’s an idea: maybe we should ban all liberals from having guns; it’s worth a try given that most killings occur in liberal cities and are committed by people of liberal persuasion.

When seeking a solution and an end to this sort of violent event, we know that outlawing guns will not accomplish the desired end to such disasters, so we need to get politicians out of the decision-making loop and let law enforcement representatives tell our legislators what to do to protect Americans. And we should also consider keeping the Washington swamp, establishment dwellers out of any solution and allow each state to try something different, if they so desire.

In the case of the recent Florida shooting, the FBI reported that they got word of a person with the same name as the suspected shooter posting a statement on social media to the effect that he intended to be a “school shooter”, but the FBI was unable to identify the person who posted the message and their investigation ended there. There is no way that anyone posting to social media cannot be identified quickly, so it seems that police departments and the FBI need better contacts and a little more power to push in order to get YouTube, Google, Twitter, etc. to cooperate with them to identify a person of suspicion. Anyone who gets the FBI or a Sheriff Department’s attention because of indiscrete actions or postings is likely someone that should be questioned and possibly whose background should be further investigated and be watched with greater scrutiny following an investigation.

Anyone who kills at random is mentally off balance and should be denied ownership of a weapon, regardless of how long he’s owned it, and police departments should be where this type of decision is made, in order to keep bad/sick guys from owning guns.

Police response time to such attacks, and even armed teachers on-site at schools, are important considerations to limiting the damage done during a shooting, but by the time such help arrives many lives may have already been lost. The only way to prevent such killings from happening in the first place is to be sure that insane people aren’t allowed to possess guns, and people making inappropriate statements should be carefully watched after questioning.

It’s impossible to ban all guns and still pretend to be an open nation with a constitution, but we can intelligently reduce the mentally at-risk members of our society and be sure they don’t have access to guns.