Since the most recent mass shooting, at a high school in Parkland Florida, the gun control debate has reached a new level of hysteria. When emotions run high, reason is usually a casualty, but the abdication from logic now being displayed by both camps over how best to stop sick-minded males – and so far this is an all-male club – from committing mass murder in our schools would be laughable if the subject were not so deadly serious. Straight-faced calls for the banning of all semi-automatic weapons are countered by calls to turn schools into fortresses. Neither side seems even mildly interested in finding any middle ground between “no guns” and “more guns”, nor will either admit that their proposed solutions will do nothing more than nibble around the edges of the problem. This impasse, deepened by hurled insults and angry protests, is beginning to look unbreakable.
That is particularly sad, because there are doable policy ideas on both agendas that might prevent some – by no means all – armed psychos from shooting up our schools. Universal background checks that ask the right questions, better communication and data sharing between agencies, buybacks of bump stocks, limits on magazine capacity, higher age qualifications for buying semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, more effective methods to identify and report those who are mentally at-risk – all of those measures are doable. So too are measures to “harden” schools, such as arming and training those school personnel who are capable and willing, employing more resource officers, making classroom doors assault-proof, upgrading security camera systems to work in real time and giving onsite officers and local law enforcement instant smartphone access to camera feeds so that they can quickly pinpoint a shooter’s location and armament. No doubt other workable ideas will surface. Smarter people than I will think of them.
What is not doable is an outright ban on the manufacture and sale of semi-automatic weapons, assault or otherwise, as is being demanded by Parkland student activists. There are some 15 million AR-15 style rifles and many millions more high-capacity (10 or more rounds) magazines already in circulation. Imagine the backlash that government attempts to confiscate them would provoke, the Second Amendment notwithstanding. Additionally, nearly all the handguns in circulation are semi-automatic. Any attempt at a ban of such magnitude would only drive the entire firearm community onto the Dark Net, if not into open revolt.
Equally not-doable, or certainly inadvisable, is the suggestion that school administrators turn their buildings into armed camps staffed by nervous teacher/warriors who want nothing to do with either end of a gun. But anyone who contends that a school with a sign over the door proclaiming it a “Gun Free Zone” is safer from attack that a school whose sign reads, “ Certain personnel in this building may be armed and are authorized to defend inhabitants with deadly force” cannot claim to be the voice of reason in this discussion.
Sadder still is the overarching fact that there is nothing – nothing – we can do, radically or reasonably, to completely insulate our schools from danger. But even if we can’t confiscate every gun or confront every shooter, any incident we do manage to mitigate or prevent will save lives. At the margins we can make a difference, but only if we stop the name-calling and sloganeering and start listening to each other.
There is much that might be done to prevent at least some school shootings if the pro and anti-gun factions could crawl even a few feet out of their dogmatic corners, but so far both sides look to be more vested in defending their ideologies than in defending the kids. That is by far the saddest fact of all.
