As always, in the aftermath of the tragic school shooting in Florida, Democrats jumped into the news with calls for more gun laws even before the smell of gun powder had dissipated in the school halls. Most of their comments were the same ones they have made after every mass shooting, but a couple stood out as being particularly stupid. For example, a reporter for CNN wrote: “In Florida, you don’t need a permit to conceal carry a rifle or shotgun, although you do need it to conceal carry a handgun.” Now anyone with half a mind knows that a rifle or a shotgun does not fit into a pocket or a purse and thus is impossible to “conceal carry,” but that didn’t stop the reporter from his inane comment.
Others have accused President Trump of doing away with a law which prohibited the mentally ill from obtaining firearms, but in fact that is untrue. He, with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) among others, rescinded an order that prevented any disabled American, even a Veteran who had lost a leg in combat, from procuring a firearm. This was an obvious abridgement of the civil rights of the disabled. The mentally ill should still be prevented from legally buying firearms through state background checks (if those checks are done properly and pertinent information is provided as if was not in the case of the church shooting in Texas).
And on Facebook someone asked where there was an incident of more than 7 casualties that wasn’t caused by guns! Well, here is a short list of multiple death incidents caused by other means (although in some cases the deaths were fewer than 7, the injuries were more):
School massacre in Bath, Michigan, 1927: 44 dead, 38 of them students bomb
Birmingham, Alabama 1963: 4 girls killed, 20 injured in church bomb
Over 3000 killed and more than 6000 wounded: September 11, 2001 4 airplanes
The Federal Building, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: 169 dead (19 children) 500+ injured bomb
Nice, France: 84 killed, 10 of them children 200+ injured truck
Barcelona, Spain: 13 killed, 50+ injured van
London, England: 8 killed, 48 injured on London Bridge van
Stockholm, Sweden: 5 killed, 14 injured truck
London, England: 5 killed, 49 injured on Westminster Bridge, policeman knifed to death car
Berlin, Germany: 11 killed, 56 injured truck
Boston Marathon, 2013: 6 killed, 260 injured bomb
It was also reported that this was the 18th school shooting already this year. That statistic comes from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg and, as the Washington Post reports, is totally wrong! The nonprofit counts any gun incident, whether or not injuries ensue, that takes place anywhere in the vicinity of a school. Examples from the Washington Post:
Take, for example, what it counts as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.
Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when — at 1 a.m. — a man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting.
Some shootings reported by Everytown included unintentional firing of guns by armed policemen on school campuses, a gun that went off accidentally in someone’s glove compartment in a school parking lot, two teens who shot up an empty school building after midnight on New Year’s Eve, and a man shot on school property about 2 a.m. and discovered the next day.
The Washington Post article concludes by saying: “In 2015, The Post’s fact checkers awarded the group’s figures — invoked by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) — four Pinocchios for misleading methodology.”
If we were to simply consider the manner in which Americans meet their deaths, we would find that gun violence ranks fifth in the list, with mass shootings falling dead last. Here are the statistics from 2013 as provided by The Oregonian.
Illness 2,404,054
Other injuries 65,866
Overdose 35,662
Automobiles 35,612
Guns 33,636 (of which 21,175 were suicides)
Non-gun violence 24,936
Gun accidents 786
Mass shootings 502
Gun laws, we have found in the United States, simply do not deter gun deaths. The killing fields that are the black and Hispanic neighborhoods of Chicago, where gun laws are stringent, prove that point. In 2016, 762 people died in gun homicides in Chicago. In 2017, while the numbers were a little lower, on one day alone, a Thursday, 7 people were killed by guns in a 12 hour period.
Then we have the example of the state of Vermont where citizens can carry concealed without a permit and where 70% of the citizens own firearms. Yet in 2015 there were only 6 gun homicides in Vermont. Six!
Gun violence in the United States peaked in 1996 and since that time has fallen by nearly one half! Yet, 170 million more firearms are owned by U.S. citizens! Truly guns are not the problem. People are the problem. Hollywood, whose stars are the first to jump on the “ban guns” bandwagon, must accept some of the responsibility for the violent nature of the culture in which we now live. Their studios pump out violent film after violent film in which people are shot to death and blow apart with casual and gleeful frequency. Our children play video games that, instead of having a little figure gobbling up other little figures, have very human-like characters killing each other in loud and graphic ways. How can those with diminished mental capacity, or those who have been bullied, or those who are suffering from clinical depression not see murder as a possible relief for their anguish?
I do not intend to minimize the tragedy and horror of mass shootings, nor to trivialize the deaths of those caught in the crosshairs. But while these are horrific events which should never occur, more effective means exist to prevent them than to pass more gun laws. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was apparently only one of several buildings on the campus. Although there were armed guards on the campus, they were not in the high school building at the time of the shooting.
Every school building should have at least two armed guards post at or near a single entrance by which everyone should enter.
Teachers with police or military training should also be armed and required to keep up their training.
Students should have regular practice in what to do in case of an active shooter and that practice should include running out the nearest door away from the shooter, hiding in the nearest classroom, not only locking classroom doors but barricading them as well with the teacher’s desks and students’ desks, and then sheltering away from the door and windows.
Student lockers are school property and school personnel have the legal right to search them at any time. Perhaps it is time that they start doing so.
A student who is barred from bringing a backpack to school, as the shooter in Parkland, Florida was, should be referred to the police for follow up. Obviously he had brought something in that backpack or they were afraid he would bring something to harm others. That should have been reported to the authorities.
In addition, according to Fox News, Broward County Sheriff’s deputies received at least 36 emergency 911 calls between 2010 and 2016 to the home where Nikolas Cruz, the alleged Parkland shooter, and his brother lived. Both boys were engaged in violent fights with their mother and with each other on a regular basis. Added to his expulsion from the high school, his history of violence should have been a red flag to authorities.
We don’t need more gun laws to take guns out of the hands of the millions of law-abiding citizens in the country. We need to find better ways to identify those who are bullied, who are mentally ill, who are depressed, who are chronically violent and help them before they seek revenge on their perceived attackers. And we need, sadly enough, to fortify our schools and even our churches lest the most innocent among us become targets of hatred and death. As it is written in 1 Peter 5:8, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”