This time last year, I was closer to a scary school event than I would wish on anyone. I don't have kids; but, a lot of friends and family with kids in middle school and high school.
In one case, there were four punks wrecking havoc at a school. They had a persistent history of violence. During one incident, they lured a student out on his own so all four could jump him and put him in the hospital.
After a few other students caught the foursome in some activities that needn't be described and reported them, the foursome extended and expanded their threats including direct Instagram messages featuring images of bullets with names on them with captions like, "This is what you'll get for telling."
Needless to say the parents notified the school. After the school told them that they couldn't and wouldn't do anything the parents went to the district. After they got the same answer from the district, they notified the police - same answer.
Everybody up the food chain in the matter knew and they all told the parents, effectively, to call them when it's time to scrape their kids' bodies off the pavement.
Fortunately, nothing involving firearms did happen. If something had happened, it would have been clear that anybody who was legally permitted to take action chose not to.
Note I said, "legally permitted." If any of the kids being threatened out of fear or desperation brought so much as a Swiss army knife to school the student would be facing immediate expulsion. Anybody not wearing a badge who comes into a situation equipped to help anybody is immediately going to face felony charges. Even if a teacher kept a gun in her car, noticed that an active shooting was happening, went to her car to get her gun, and subdued the shooter, she would be facing years in prison.
Incidentally, Suzanna Hupp witnessed her parents being murdered by a mass shooter in Texas because Texas law made it a felony to carry a gun in her purse; so, she left her gun in the car which left the shooter with more than twenty unarmed victims before the police arrived. We've created a legal situation in which people who want the means to protect themselves face greater threats from governments than people who want to do harm and we act surprised when these acts of evil keep happening.
Now, about ten to fifteen years ago, the arguments for disarming citizens were still wrong; but, they were coherent. The anti-gun groups used to say "Get an alarm system. Call a cop." Well, especially now, we should all know that that's as dumb as the duck and cover drills that we used to do in case of a nuclear strike. The Supreme Court has already ruled at least twice that police can't be sued for failing to provide protection. The reality is that it was probably legally safer for the Uvalde police to sit around for an hour while kids are being murdered than it would have been for them to take more immediate action.
Now that most gun control advocates wouldn't be caught dead telling people to call the cops or say anything positive about cops, the entire line of reasoning has gone from wrong to patently absurd. Who do you think is going to be enforcing these new gun control laws that you want? How do you think that they'll be enforcing them? Who's more likely to participate in a gun buyback - me or a gangbanger?
Are you going to be cool with cops doing random checks on houses to make sure that their guns are properly locked up at all times? Imagine Breonna Taylor times several hundred. You want to defund or abolish the police while demanding that the police have full minority report powers and an absolute monopoly over the use of force over people that they themselves disarmed.
Beating this drum of, "Just get rid of the weapons." is less than helpful. The problem is that governments are less than useless and they're putting us into these precarious situations. The problem is the millions of people who still think that governments are worth something and put so little work into their thinking that they can't realize that they're talking out of both sides of their mouths.
