Posted on 04/22/2009 6:06:05 AM PDT by marktwain
Several of my colleagues are today observing the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado.
As we look back on that terrible day, many Americans try to sort out what led to the event, and what might be done in the future to prevent another such tragedy.
The answer is alarmingly simple, and nobody is going to like it.
We cannot prevent more Columbines. There it is. If we could, there would have been no Virginia Tech. The shooting at Red Lake High School in Minnesota would not have happened. We would never have read about the shooting at Northern Illinois University.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and its state-level colleagues at various “CeaseFire” groups argue that “closing the gun show loophole” will help. That’s preposterous and they know it. While Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris obtained at least a couple of guns from an adult friend who legally bought them at a gun show, in the years since, none of the gunmen who shot up any school or shopping mall has gotten his guns from a gun show.
People call Columbine the worst school massacre in the country’s history, but that’s also a lie. Nobody remembers the Bath School bombing in May 1927 in which a disgruntled school board member named Andrew Kehoe blew up the Bath Consolidated School and killed 45 people, most of them elementary school-age children. He used dynamite, and he didn’t get it at a gun show.
The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building.
Can we take steps to minimize the likelihood of future Columbines? Sure.
Step One: Abolish gun-free school zones and those insidious “zero tolerance” rules that victimize and demonize students who are now afraid to talk about hunting, target shooting or competition; rules that prevent teachers or administrators from having a firearm. Instead of firing those teachers, fire the Chicken Little administrators and replace the school board members – and their attorneys – who cling to zero tolerance and gun free zone mandates as substitutes for common sense and courage. (I wrote about this with co-author Alan Gottlieb in our book America Fights Back: Armed Self-Defense in a Violent Age)
Assistant Principal Joel Myrick stopped a school gunman at Pearl, MS on Oct. 1, 1997 – 19 months before Columbine – by rushing to his car, grabbing a pistol he had there, and confronting gunman Luke Woodham, who quickly surrendered rather than get shot. Myrick hardly gets mentioned these days because he used a handgun to stop a killer, much the same as the armed students who interceded at the Apalachian Law School shooting are essentially ignored.
Step Two: Schools should pin medals on students like Jacob Ryker, the hero teen of Thurston High School in Springfield, OR in May 1998 – 11 months before Columbine – who understood quickly “from his own experience with guns” that teen gunman Kip Kinkel had run out of ammunition and tackled him. Ryker was shot in the melee, but he got in some good licks on the little scumbag before the authorities arrived and took Kinkel into custody. Schools should encourage other teens like Ryker, they should offer classes in firearm safety and hunter education as part of the curriculum.
When his rifle ran out of ammunition and Kinkel began to reload, wounded student Jacob Ryker—recognizing from his own experience with guns that Kinkel was out of ammunition (and understood that this was the best chance to stop Kinkel)—tackled him, and was soon assisted by several other students.
Step Three: Instead of marginalizing gun owners and groups like the NRA, the news media needs a philosophical overhaul, after which it should marginalize gun prohibitionists and groups like the Brady Campaign. For decades, we’ve tried it their way with increasingly strict and intolerant rules that border on the insane, and all we have to show for it is a list of tragedies and a body count.
It should be noted for the record that, like school board member Andrew Kehoe, who murdered his wife before committing his atrocity, Woodham killed his mother and Kinkel murdered both of his parents.
What we learn from Columbine and other shootings is that gun control groups exploit such tragedies for their own political ends. They pretty much dance in the blood of the victims to push an agenda that may, but usually does not, have anything remotely to do with the crime they are condemning. Their goal is disarmament -- victim disarmament, if you will -- and they don't seem to grasp the fact that if people are caught in imminent life-threatening situations and cannot fight back, they frequently die.
The “real lesson of Columbine,” if there must be one is that we should have taken a lesson from Pearl High School and Thurston High School.
Alas, gun-phobic school administrators and teachers, and gun-hating politicians, continue with their heads in the sand, and other dark places, enforce a philosophy and defend laws that haven't worked, and that will only give us more of the same.
While I was subbing and had the Code Black, my daughter was in her 'Govt/Current Events' class. Her teacher served in Iraq and is pretty conservative. He got all the kids squared away and brought out a bat one of the pre-Engineering classes made for him and stood by the door, should someone try and enter. He assured the students that anyone trying to get to them would have to go thru him first!
Some of those "tested soldiers" will eventually become teachers. I would trust them in a heartbeat to carry a firearm to protect the children. "Gun Free School Zones" are simply ridiculous.
The world is a seething pile of dung. When you bring children into the world, you are opening up the immediate possibility that they will be slaughtered and there is nothing you can do about it. Don’t count on this country ever coming to its senses. Things will only ever get worse.
I do want to get a handgun when we have the money to do so. I think I would enjoy target shooting and it would offer more protection than the large knives I keep hidden (bedroom & kitchen) yet handy, should I need them.
Billions of dollars are spent on fire alarms and sprinkler systems in schools, yet not one child has died in a school fire in decades in the US. Hundreds have been killed in school violence, yet most administrators and politicians just put their fingers in their ears and chant, “LALALA, I CAN”T HEAR YOU!!” whenever school violence is mentioned.
It's not that they don't grasp the concept; they don't care.
Their policies are aimed at preventing others from conducting the kind of self-defense that they know they are incapable of doing. What they fear isn't guns, but that someone else's courage will draw attention to their cowardice. In the gun grabber's mind, the courage of one only serves to highlight the cowardice of another. It's rather like the zero sum gain theory of economics that many of the same people embrace; the idea that if one person becomes wealthy, another must have become impoverished. The gun grabber would rather die cowering in a corner knowing that everyone else around them cowing rather than be saved by one brave individual who chooses to act. They would rather die than risk having their cowardice exposed for all the world to see.
Freud had it right: The fear of weapons is a sign of mental illness.
“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.” ~~ Sigmund Freud
True, but first the police have to show up. That takes time. And just as the perpetrators know to do their mayhem at disarmed victim zones, they also know that they need to blockade themselves in if they plan on maximizing the damage they do.
While the idea is nice it's never going to happen. The mind set of the news media is thoroughly so ensconced in gun control that it'll never get away from it.
I share your pessimism. Why? Because answers such as proposed in this fine article will never be implemented.
The great battle between Community and Individuals was lost by Individuals a long time ago. Even though the Constitution was written to 'protect' individuals with freedom, our institutions have rejected this wisdom and replaced it with plastic communitarianism.
This symptom/disease may be common among large societies where 'rules' designed to affect behavior become the norm, and liberty is told to ride at the back of the bus. The joke's on them though: people will always break 'rules', but they'll hesitate, and may even change their mind when their intended victim has them in their sights.
Their chosen path to Nirvana is the wrong path, thus making most things 'dung' as you observe. How any society is to successfully navigate the River of Sh*t without paddles is anyone's guess.
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