Premature Observations on the Parkland School Shootings, by John Hinderaker.
Liberals, naturally, are braying about “common sense gun legislation.” Barack Obama is one among many. Of course, they never can tell us what those “common sense” reforms might be. To the extent that it isn’t sheer political calculation, their hysteria represents a childish wish that firearms didn’t exist. I actually might agree with them on that, but for firearms to disappear you would have to erase 500 years of history. You might as well try to ban knives. But liberalism isn’t about practical solutions, it is about expressing emotion while trying to garner votes. …
Mass school shootings are, thankfully, rare. The liberal talking point, endlessly repeated today, that this is the 18th school shooting of 2018 is simply false. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for corrections from the Democratic Party media, however.) But what, practically, can we do to prevent them? In recent years, just about every school district in America has hired an army of administrators of various sorts. If I were the principal of a school, the first thing I would do is terminate one of those administrator positions and replace it with an armed guard. The high school that my children all attended had a guard on the premises at all times, and while he didn’t display a weapon, my kids assumed he was armed. That should be true in every school. In some high schools, multiple armed police officers are present. …
As seems to be the case in all mass shooting incidents, Nikolas Cruz was nutty as a fruitcake. Fellow students immediately assumed that he was the “shooter.” The fundamental problem here relates to mental health. Having emptied its insane asylums in a misguided attempt at “liberation,” the U.S. is virtually without a mental health system. President Trump, despite the derision of the Democratic Party media, is absolutely right to emphasize this aspect of the problem. …
In my opinion, people on the scene of a mass shooting incident are consistently given bad advice. Hiding and waiting for the murderer to find you is, generally, a poor strategy. In the best case, it won’t stop others from being killed. If three or four able-bodied men rush a single murderer from different directions, they will almost certainly be able to disable him. This is especially true if he is armed with a rifle, which is effective at a distance but not intended for close combat. Rushing a shooter takes courage and a certain degree of coordination, but it likely will work, as in the incident dramatized in The 15:17 To Paris.
