Putting An End To School Shootings

The Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida has set a new record, but not one that anyone would normally call attention to. The record, in this case, is one of liberal media bias, something that has become more and more obvious in the last few years.

Specifically, the left-wing mainstream media has managed to keep this shooting and their efforts to use it to push for gun control in the headlines for over a month.

Granted, the media had some help in doing this, with the supposedly grass-roots student walk-out in protest of gun violence on March 14^th. But as much as the progressive-liberal propaganda machine would like to have us believe that this was a grass-roots student movement, it wasn’t.

The event was organized by the same organizers for the woman’s march that happened shortly after President Trump took office.

Now, here’s the interesting part; the woman’s march and the various organizations who collaborated on organizing that event have received $246 millions from George Soros, the financier behind every anti-American movement out there.

So, what was this really all about? Obviously it was about gun control. Soros is also one of the major powers behind the one world government movement, which can’t succeed as long as We the People have the ability to fight back against tyranny.

The armed citizens of the United States is the largest army in the world; and while we are not organized as an army or equipped with modern high-tech weaponry, we could stand off any attack by any army the UN could muster.

Those who underestimate the power of armed Americans as a fighting force have forgotten the lessons of the Vietnam War and other similar conflicts, in which armed insurgents, having nothing more than personal firearms to use as weapons, were able to hold off major military powers.

We lost that war, even though we clearly had the technological advantage and more firepower at our disposal.

The students who participated in the walkout have been duped by the progressive-liberal establishment. That’s not too surprising, considering that the vast majority of educators at all levels are Democrats, the party of progressive-liberalism.

As Adolf Hitler once said, “Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state.”

Hitler understood that controlling what children learn will control their worldview as adults. Clearly, the progressive-liberal movement has learned to follow his example, and is hard at work indoctrinating our children into their political ideology.

This makes it easy for those same liberals to manipulate impressionable children (including teens) into following blindly along the path that the liberal elite create, becoming mere pawns in the hands their “betters.”

Interestingly enough, if you look at the signs that these students were carrying on the day of the walkout, most don’t talk about gun control. Rather, they talk about fear and ending the violence in the schools. The signs which talk about gun control are mostly teachers for gun control, not students.

But to those in the mainstream media, the two are the same. The way to get rid of gun violence is to get rid of the guns. That’s why the cities with the highest rates of gun violence in the country are Democrat controlled cities with the strictest gun control laws in the country.

As we all know, liberals want to eliminate guns entirely. Not just eliminate them legally, repealing the Second Amendment; but repealing the laws of physics that allow guns to work.

©shutterstock.com

Since they can’t do that, then the next best thing, from their point of view, is to get those guns out of the hands of people who they can’t control… in other words, the American public, especially conservatives. Then, they can turn the United States into a true police state, ready for the one world government.

But that’s still down the road a ways. The leftist propaganda plan to turn the American people against guns isn’t working. Oh, it’s strengthening those who are already on the left’s attitude against guns, but that’s all it’s doing.

On paper, those of us who support the Second Amendment are winning, as the laws of our country and especially of the several states, are becoming more positive towards guns, with more states making it easier to carry concealed, passing open carry laws and even scrapping gun control in favor of Constitutional Carry.

Nevertheless, we can expect the anti-gun crowd to continue pushing to take away our God-given rights to defend ourselves, just as they have in other countries.

This is their solution to the problem of school shootings, even though it has been fairly well proven that what makes schools such attractive targets is that they are gun-free zones.

Cutting to the Chase

The left loves to blame these shootings on the NRA and legal gun owners in general, demonizing us as a bunch of murderers, who get their kicks by body count. But the reality is, if we were really as dangerous as they say we are, they wouldn’t exist. We would have killed them long ago.

Nobody is pleased by murder, except the same sort of mentally disturbed people who commit it. Yet according to some conspiracy theorists on the right, some of these events are orchestrated by leftists in an effort to force gun control.

While I’m sure that there are those who will try to benefit from it, politically or otherwise, I would no more blame anyone on the left for causing these horrific events, than I would blame those on the right. Painting any group of people with such a broad brush is merely verbal bullying; it is not an effective means of discussing policy.

The question that stands before us as a nation, is how to stop these sorts of events. While we can all agree on them being horrible, when it comes to talking about how to stop them, there is no agreement at all. Those on the left opt for more gun control, while those on the right opt for good guys with guns, to counter the bad guys with guns.

In such a debate facts and statistics should be important; but sadly, they are not. At least, they are not to those on the left. They are being ideologically and emotionally driven, not bothering to look at the facts. Of course, the facts don’t back up their ideology, which probably makes it hard for them to take an honest look at them.

But the facts are rather clear.

Fact #1

The first fact is that almost all mass shootings happen in gun free zones. While there are exceptions, they are far outnumbered by the ones which take place in gun free zones. But even within those exceptions, there are many which have taken place in places where one would not expect to find guns, such as churches.

It is clear that the type of criminals who commit these mass shootings look for gun free zones as likely targets. Since schools are typically gun free zones, that makes them an ideal free-fire zone for these lunatics. Added to that, is the sheer horror of someone killing kids, something sure to grab the attention of any news source.

Fact #2

No matter how effective a police force is, they are limited by law to operating in a reactionary mode. This means that unless they happen to be at the school when the shooting starts, it will take them anywhere from three to eight minutes to even arrive at the school.

So, counting on the police for protection only works if the police are stationed at the school.

As we saw in the Parkland shooting, even that is no guarantee of protection for our children. If there is any lessons that can be taken away from that particular school shooting, they should be about the failure of law enforcement. Despite around 80 warnings about that killer, law enforcement didn’t do their jobs.

That particular shooting should never have happened.

We should also keep in mind that this is not the only mass shooting where the shooter should not have been able to get their hands on a gun. The Southerland Springs shooter was ex-military, with a history of mental problems. His name should have gone into the NICS database and he should not have been able to buy the guns that he used in that attack.

Fact #3

There are a number of different studies which show that gun control doesn’t stop crime; it is purely a “feel good” measure, so that those who support and pass those laws feel like they’ve done something.

As anyone knows, criminals don’t obey the law. So unless all guns could be eliminated, worldwide, they will always find ways of getting their hands on guns. With somewhere over 300 million privately-owned guns in the United States alone, there is no practical way of eliminating them all.

But even if they were somehow all miraculously eliminated, the most readily available gun in the world is the AK-47, and that’s not produced here in the US.

Fact #4

Although the gun control crowd tries to downplay it, there are somewhere between 100,000 and 2,000,000 gun-related crimes per year that are stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns legally. Unfortunately, there is no single database of these incidents and most go unreported.

The only statistics which are gathered are those where a legal gun owner kills in self-defense, which is a very small part of the total times a gun is used in self-defense.

In roughly 70% of the cases where a person who is legally carrying a gun concealed, they don’t have to fire a shot to stop a crime. Merely making it known that they are armed, by showing their gun, is enough to cause the criminals to flee.

By and large, criminals don’t want a murder rap hanging over their heads; their prime motivation in using a gun is to intimidate. So they will flee, rather than fight.

Fact #5

Criminals of any type, but especially those who commit mass murder, avoid places where there are armed guards. As previously noted, they don’t want a gunfight; they want to commit their crime and get away. That’s why there are so few attacks on the president, even though there have always been many people who hated each and every president we ever had.

Armed guards are not a perfect solution to crime, but they are the strongest deterrent there is. All passive defenses can be breached by someone who has the will to get thorough them. At some point, they have to be backed up by active defenses; someone with a gun.

Fact #6

As gun laws have become less prohibitive and more civilians have been armed, it has resulted in a net lowering of the violent crime rate, including the rate of gun-related violent crimes. Liberals love to point to the high number of gun-related killings in our country, but are somewhat dishonest in their use of statistics.

Two-thirds of the murders they refer to are suicides, and a large portion of the rest are gang-related activity.

Eliminating guns does not eliminate violence. Mankind has killed multiple millions of our own kind without guns. In the history of weapons, guns are the newcomers. Yet people killed each other with poisons, knives, rocks, sticks and a variety of other weapons through the years.

Eliminating guns would merely force killers to use other weapons, just as it has in other countries which have restrictive gun laws.

Fact #7

You can’t stop an armed killer with good wishes, warm fuzzies, or a cell phone. The only way to stop them is for someone to take them out of action. Whether that is shooting them in the head or throwing a net over them and rendering them immobile, something has to happen to stop their actions.

So, What do We Do?

It is clear, based on the facts that I’ve listed above, that the solution is to protect our children with guns. As a society we do that with anyone or anything else that is of value, so why don’t we do it with our children? Could it be that not protecting them is merely an ideological decision and not a practical one?

©shutterstock.com

There are those who are more cynical than I, who would say that we don’t protect our children with armed guards because liberals want to point to these school shootings as a reason for gun control. I hope that those people are not right, as the idea that anyone would purposely allow our country’s children to be at risk. Anyone who would do such a thing is reprehensible.

Sadly, it is clear that we must turn our schools into armed camps, much like they are in Israel. There, teachers are all armed and there is an extremely low rate of school shootings. That’s rather amazing, when you consider that Hamas and other terrorist groups are constantly attacking Israel.

I don’t care if we hire armed guards, station police at schools, put military veterans to work as school guards or arm our teachers; we must protect our kids. Why not use all of those methods? The more protection we can offer our children, the better. That’s a much better use of our tax dollars, then many other things that schools waste them on.

However, anyone who is going to be around our children with firearms must be properly trained. A school is probably one of the worst tactical environments you can find. There are a lot of innocents around, who can accidentally catch a stray bullet. That would be tragic. Proper training is essential, so as to minimize the chances of that happening.

What Can We Do Personally?

Taking it to another level, what can you and I do personally to help guarantee the safety of our children? First of all, there are many legislative battles yet to be fought over this subject. Therefore, we must use the power of the voting booth wisely, electing representatives who will ensure our children’s safety and support our Second Amendment rights.

While those are merely two of many political issues facing our country today, they are important ones.

Secondly, we need to make our voice heard. Liberals are much better at making noise than we are. The reason why there is such a huge cry out for gun control, is that the liberals are all screaming the same thing and the liberal-controlled media is repeating it.

We need to keep raising the question of mental health, as well as denouncing the media for sensationalizing these killers and empowering them through their reporting.

Then, we must protect our own children. My children are grown now, so I don’t have to worry about them being caught in a school shooting. But it won’t be long before my grandchildren are in that position. So I am directly concerned about protecting my grandchildren.

When my grandchildren reach school age, they will be carrying backpacks to school, just like every other child out there. But they will have two items that most of those children don’t have. They’ll have a ballistic isnert in their backpack and simple rubber a doorstop.

One of the children who died in the Parkland shooting did so because he heroically held a classroom door closed against the shooter. Enraged, the killer shot through the door, killing him. His life could have been saved, if someone in that classroom had kept a rubber doorstop in their backpack.

Ballistic inserts, of the type I mentioned are readily available from a number of different body armor manufacturers. They fit inside the backpack, against the back wall. In the case of a shooting, the user puts the backpack on their chest, rather than their back, offering their vital organs protection from harm.

While not a perfect solution, this is enough to stop all pistol bullets, providing some protection.

The other thing I will do, is teach my children what to do in the case of such an attack. I will go into their classrooms with them and help them to identify the best hiding places. I will show they how to escape and when they are big enough, I’ll teach them how to fight back.

My grandchildren are too valuable for me not to do this. How about yours?