Appearing on MSNBC, 2016 Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump told Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, “We have millions of sick people all over the world… This is sort of unique to our country – the school shootings.”
Trump touts two policies to fight school shootings: more concealed carry and better mental healthcare. But the left ignores both of those prescriptions, as well as a third: additional security at schools.
There are approximately 135,000 public, private, and post-secondary schools in the United States. A huge number of major shootings have taken place at schools: Umpqua Community College; University of California at Santa Barbara; Santa Monica College; Sandy Hook Elementary School; Oikos College; University of Alabama in Huntsville; Northern Illinois University; Virginia Tech; Red Lake High School; Marysville Pilchuck High School; Red Lake High School; University of Arizona College of Nursing; Santana High School; Columbine High School; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Lindhurst High School; Stockton, California; the list goes on and on.
Certainly, with well over 100 million law-abiding American gun-owners, targeting gun owners would be significantly more difficult than protecting schools. More importantly, though President Obama scorns those who believe that more guns can prevent crime, more guns held by law-abiding, well-trained people do prevent crime. Obama should talk to his own Secret Service if he thinks otherwise.
Umpqua Community College had one guard on shift at a time. Unarmed. But it did notify those on campus that it was a gun free zone, just like most campuses across America. And according to retired Umpqua Community College president Joe Olson, the college decided against an armed security guard in the last few months. “We talked about that over the last year because we were concerned about safety on campus,” he said. “The campus was split 50-50. We thought we were a very safe campus, and having armed security officers on campus might change the culture.”
Typically, those who oppose armed guards, or arming teachers on campuses, cite idiocies like “changing the culture” or “making children uncomfortable.” Randi Weingarten, head of the National Education Association, has written, “Schools must be safe sanctuaries, not armed fortresses. Anyone who would suggest otherwise doesn’t understand that our public schools must first and foremost be places where teachers can safely educate and nurture our students.”
This is asinine. The only way to keep students safe is to provide security, not hope that gunmen abide by “Gun-Free Zone” signs. In Israel, in order to prevent terrorist attacks, armed guards are posted in schools routinely. That has indeed prevented terrorist attacks. When I attended a Jewish high school in Los Angeles, located next to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, administration provided heavy security – and it worked. In 1999, during the summer months of my high school term, Buford Furrow, a white supremacist with a history of mental illness, stopped by the Wiesenthal Center and wanted to shoot it up – but there was security. So he promptly motored over to the North Valley Jewish Community Center, where there were no armed guards, and proceeded to shoot five people.
So yes, more guns at schools would be a useful measure.
But we won’t do that. Instead, we’ll have asinine, ineffective conversations about “sensible” and “modest” gun control measures the left never specifies. Oregon already has universal background checks, closing the misnamed “gun show loophole”; Oregon already has laws preventing those who have been committed to mental health facilities from owning guns; Oregon already prevents convicted felons and juvenile felony offenders from owning guns. So, what laws exactly would have stopped this shooting, according to Democrats?
The answer: none. But that won’t stop them from pushing utterly unrelated gun control regulations in an attempt to confiscate the firearms of the law-abiding.
Following up on President Obama’s egregiously insulting press conference, at which Obama essentially called for full-scale gun confiscation by citing the gun record of Australia and Great Britain, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) said, “There is a consensus for serious gun control, including among people who own guns. And I think that’s what we have to bring about.” Sanders then added, awkwardly, “I don’t know that anybody knows what the magic solution is. What we do know is that the current situation is not tenable. It is clearly not working.”
Zero specifics were offered by Sanders. None were offered by Vice President Joe Biden, either; he simply blathered, “The Second Amendment doesn’t say you can own a bazooka, it doesn’t say you can own an F-15 with hellfire missiles. There’s the ability of government to limit the type of weapon that is available.” First off, F-15s don’t carry hellfire missiles. But the “do something” mentality – which is actually code for revoking the Second Amendment – has taken hold on the left. Hillary Clinton is part of that mentality, too. She called for “sensible gun control measures,” another focus-grouped response, but could not name such measures.
Democrats refuse to see commonalities among shooters, or among locations of mass shootings. Instead, they focus on the gun – even though a higher percentage of schools are hit by gun violence than gun owners are responsible for gun violence. That’s because the left loves using mass shootings as an excuse to implicitly promote a full grab, knowing full well that the policies they espouse leave Americans vulnerable at schools across the country.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.