Leaders and lawmakers appear particularly motivated this time around to embrace a myriad of ideas in the wake of the Parkland, FL school shooting tragedy. In no particular order or preference there are calls for to arm school teachers and staff; deploy additional School Resource Officers (both uniformed and covert); improve the background check process; ban bump stocks that augment automatic weapons; enhance the options available to mental health professionals to temporarily detain and/or place into custody those deemed to be a risk to public safety; and restrict the purchase of firearms to those 21 years old and over. The old standbys of limiting magazine capacities and eliminating automatic and semi-automatic weapons all together have never gone away, so we’ll count those as still out there.

Arming teachers and staff will do more harm than good. Student-teacher altercations are prevalent in schools, hence the need for SROs in the first place. Gone are the days when twelve nuns rode herd on eight hundred adherent pupils; assaults on teachers, and student-on-student violence are a common occurrence. How long will it take before we hear a teacher had to shoot a student in “self-defense”? How long will it be before we see a student has disarmed a teacher and taken their weapon, because the teacher was afraid to fire on an unarmed student? Leading to what? The SRO having to shoot the student now armed with the teacher’s gun? And adding to the stress and split-second decisions required of the gallant first responders, how long before a responding police officer caps a gun-toting teacher in the hall, mistaking him for the shooter?

Certainly there are faculty and staff both capable and willing to put themselves between a shooter and their students, and they deserve the ability to shield the students with more than just their bodies. Should the high school commandant of the ROTC be armed? Perhaps. Should the retired US Marine-football coach be allowed to carry? Possibly. Should a vice principal recently retired from law enforcement bring her weapon to school? Maybe. But as noble and reasonable as it sounds to arm a select few that meet the President’s nebulous definition of “adept with a firearm”, it will inevitably result in tragedy somewhere.

Additional School Resource Officers sounds fine, a course of action few would argue with, save for the cost. However, we learned this tactic is not a panacea for prevention, nor even one for timely interdiction. If a shooter is willing to die, then some innocents will die until the first responders, well, respond. The number of casualties will depend upon the training, reaction and skills of the law enforcement officer(s) on site, but to suggest more officers will insure “this never happens again” is the blather of politicians. If you don’t know that, well you should. The secondary notion that schools could deploy “air marshal-type” undercover officers as a deterrent to the open invitation presented by a “gun free zone” is similarly ludicrous. It has not been proven school shooters are cowards, per se. To pre-suppose the potential of encountering a covert law enforcement officer would dissuade a delusional person from attempting carnage because this may not the “gun free zone” it’s cracked up to be, is a leap too far.

Calls for improving the background check process is demonstrative of abject government failure. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the vehicle which rendered mandatory waiting periods passé, (a brainchild in many ways of the National Rifle Association), lacks the essential input of criminal records nationwide as only 38 states currently participate, and does not include persons with adjudicated mental illness. This is criminal negligence. Those in charge should be prosecuted. It is government ineptitude on a scale that should surprise no one. To believe the government capable of an undertaking such as a national background check system, and manage it flawlessly absent horrific scandal, is pie-in-the-sky Pollyanna-thinking. Where did the blind confidence in our institutions come from? Time after time there is a loophole, a hiccup, a dropped ball, and yet, we believe. Shameful, the price of bliss.

Next up is the incongruous ban on the bump fire stocks, a trendy bogeyman that came out of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. From Columbine to Parkland, can anyone make a case that the inability to purchase this accessory would have, in any way imaginable, changed the outcome of these tragedies? Until and unless federal law enforcement ever comes clean on what really happened at the Mandalay Bay, we’ll never know for sure what role, if any, this device played in the planning, execution, and body count there. But by all means, let’s demonize it and outlaw it, unconstitutionally and by presidential decree if necessary. Nice precedent you’re setting there.

The most fertile ground for solution and prevention lies in the field of mental health. But the four entities that could divine a likely shooter before the fact are as disjointed as pre-9/11 intelligence agencies. For progress on this front to occur, there would have to be coordinated information sharing, and empowering legislation, to enable the juvenile justice system, the mental health professionals, the school superintendents and local law enforcement to identify, detain, and evaluate persons deemed “most likely”. Those who demonstrate the characteristics by word or deed that align with known behavioral disorders associated with school shooters can be involuntarily remanded for clinical evaluation and treatment. Their owned firearms can be confiscated, and their names go in to the NICS database to insure they cannot get a weapon. This gives the government, already stipulated as inept in so much of its oversight responsibilities, an inordinate position of power over its citizens, and the potential for abuse is sky high. Even imagining juvenile courts, psychologists, school boards and cops could ever agree on much of anything, let alone the predicative analytics of who might be a school shooter one day, is a reach. But this is the place that promises something nearing a step in the right direction.

Restricting firearm sales to persons 21 and over, without an unambiguous waiver for our military personnel, is farcical, and worthy only of the political pandering it represents. Currently, handgun sales are age-restricted, a serious abrogation of the rights of voting-age citizens, but the outcry is muted so, so be it. A rural single mom may need more than a restraining order one day to protect her family from an abusive ex-spouse. But when the compassionate deputy tells her, “lady, you might want to get a gun”, she can’t be left to answer, “I will, as soon as my birthday comes around”. There better be allowances for the lawful ownership of rifles by persons 18 and older. Maybe not assault rifles, but owning a firearm for home defense cannot be abridged by the arbitrary, event-driven assignation of 21 and older.

The issue of assault rifles is wholly overblown given the statistical reality that gun deaths are overwhelmingly attributable to handguns. But automatic rifles are the headline news du jour so something must come to pass. The ammunition fired from these weapons is truly lethal, and gruesome mass casualties will result each time one is used for mayhem by a pathological killer. But an outright ban is politically untenable at present, primarily because it is a soothing balm and not a demonstrable solution. To seek that remedy will result in inevitable deadlock and no action. What would be palatable, and even beneficial, would be a type of “extreme vetting” (remember how well that has been received in other quarters) whereby police interview prospective buyers to determine their fitness to own such a weapon, (let’s see if a ninth circuit judge in Hawaii will weigh in on that one). Naturally a surtax would be levied on the purchaser to cover the additional expense of such measures, but freedoms do come with a cost. Of course criminals and gang bangers will not submit to such a requirement; they will continue to burglarize gun stores for their armaments (a recent phenomenon that rivals the frequency of after-hour jewelry heists and electronics store break-ins nationwide, by the way). But we can live with that because MS 13 generally does not shoot up schools, not as yet anyway. Let’s just be damned sure we vet anyone responsible enough to follow the law. Instead of the mindless push to restrict sales, perhaps manufacturers could be incentivized to not produce them. We paid farmers cash to stop growing corn, maybe there’s a place for subsidizing gun makers to curb production?

So where does this leave us? We have dozens of corporations exploiting the tragedy by smugly severing their “branding ties” with the NRA. Not with Planned Parenthood though; you don’t hear calls for banning embryotomy scissors. Which is responsible for the deaths of more children, the forceps or the bump stock?

How in God’s name can the NRA be accountable for no one in law enforcement heeding the clarion call? How can the NRA be held to account for the unfathomable dereliction of duty displayed by the Sheriff’s Office that fateful morning? How can the NRA be blamed for the failures of government to manage a background check database so bereft of data as to be just short of fraudulent; a placebo at best when you factor in the mental health omissions.

We have a sheriff-politician in Broward County unwilling to acknowledge the epic failure of his deputies to act. We have the remnants of the Obama-era “Promise Program”, which incentivized schools to under report campus crime, especially crimes attributed to minorities. Is this why the numerous complaints about shooter Nikolas Cruz never made it into the system? Will we learn the degree to which Chicago-transplant Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie followed the tenets of the Promise Program to the detriment of all? Unlikely.

• We have an FBI that defied every convention in dismissing the real-time, actionable leads provided on Nicholas Cruz, to this day without adequate explanation. The Hawaii governor was more forthcoming over the bogus incoming ballistic missile alert.
• We have a shooter in Las Vegas that dutifully filed forty-four assault rifle purchase applications with the ATF that was not flagged as worthy of inquiry. Exactly how many purchases of automatic weapons does it take to raise an eyebrow there?
• Devin Kelley shot up a Sutherland Springs church in Texas as the result of a domestic row with a weapon he purchased despite incarceration for domestic assault because military bureaucrats neglected to enter his conviction into the database.

This is government ineptitude on a breathtaking scale. And we’re only talking schools, concerts and churches. We’re not even touching on the botched prevention of domestic terrorism at the Boston Marathon and the Pulse Nightclub. Were the San Fernando shooters stoppable? If the State Department was more selective and did better job managing visas, maybe. If neighbors who witnessed bomb making weren’t cowed by political correctness from saying something, perhaps. Was the Fort Hood shooting preventable? Absolutely, provided the armed forces were permitted to operate as a military unit and not a human resources department. Innocent bloodshed has been the hallmark of government’s social experiments, and the lab rats are dead Americans. The PC-culture abridges freedom of speech; the lockstep, uncurious mainstream media abridges freedom of the press; and a rogue judiciary abridges freedom of religion. And to what end? To expand a government that neither serves nor protects its citizenry.

Nowhere, however, are those in charge addressing the common denominator in many of the country’s most notorious mass killings: the aforementioned government ineptitude. It is perfectly reasonable to assume government will fail to control, manage and correct the behavioral deficiencies of three hundred and thirty million people, many of whom have no roots in the country or a working understanding of what makes society function here. But when it has never been more clearly illustrated that government failure, on so many levels, is ground zero for blame the more this case is studied, how can it be that we turn to government for explanation and follow its corrupted lead in seeking answers? If government was proven equally negligent in enforcing traffic laws, would we ban automobiles or demand better government?

Let’s just be honest with these kids, and with each other. The underlying problems that lead to mass shootings are not the guns on store shelves. The causes emanate from a broken culture, absent the cohesive values of a nuclear family and a moral code reflecting a secular society. In place of God, country, and family, we are offered groupthink, neo-diversity, and bureaucracy. That evolution will not serve us well.

What I find vexing in the media coverage of the whole Collusion-Dossier-Dirty-Tricks story is the inability of journalists to ascribe proper rationale to the “Comey October Surprise”, namely his brief re-opening of the Clinton email server scandal in the run-up to the 2016 election. Republicans identify Comey, and his underling Andrew McCabe, as lynchpins of an FBI-DOJ conspiracy to derail the Trump campaign, and subsequently, to undermine his presidency. And there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to support that argument. Concurrently, the Democrats point to Comey as the man who torpedoed Hillary’s candidacy by resurfacing the email server investigation, er, matter, at a most inopportune time, dooming her election. That argument, too, can be easily supported, at least anecdotally. So how come there is no definitive understanding as to Comey’s motives to act in such a bi-polar fashion?

The FBI issued its findings exonerating Clinton in June 2016 with the Director’s assurances that every recoverable email relating to the matter had been thoroughly reviewed for its classification status and that Clinton’s actions in this regard did not rise to the level of criminality. That is a lie. The Director also offered assurances that all parties related to the matter had been interviewed and no criminal wrongdoing could be established. That, too, is a lie. Further, the Director assured all devices engaged in the trafficking of classified emails through the Clinton server had been confiscated, inspected, scrubbed and/or destroyed, and could no longer be susceptible to hacking by foreign actors or enemy agents. This was not a lie, per se, it was however a telling oversight.

It brings to mind Donald Rumsfeld’s clever term, “the unknown unknowns”. For unbeknownst to the Director and his crack pool of counter-terrorism investigators, there came to light a laptop in the possession of an ex-Congressman-turned-internet-celebrity (to be polite), Anthony Weiner, that contained heretofore unseen email correspondence sent and received by Ms. Clinton’s trusted advisor and confidante, Uma Aberdeen, the estranged wife of the laptop-possessor.

This revelation had to bring great consternation to Comey, who defied convention and spoke publicly, and at great length, that no evidence of criminality could be found in the matter. And yet, here is this laptop that may contain ironclad contradictions to his public assurances. Chances were good that the emails on this laptop were duplicative in nature to the ones already examined in his investigation, and therefore moot as far as undermining Comey’s exoneration of Hillary.

But what if? Suppose there were references to the FBI’s sources and methods in the matter that point directly to a singular conclusion: the fix was in. That agents had dispensed with standard protocol in their interviews and that Hillary and her cabal – Aberdeen, Cheryl Mills, even Bill Clinton – got preferential treatment, to include attorney privilege, formal immunity and limited disclosure of records. All courtesy of biased investigators and DOJ lawyers now known to be both anti-Trump and wary of future retribution from a President Clinton.

Could Comey chance that? Could he hope that the publicly disgraced Anthony Weiner was not privy to the laptops contents, and that Weiner wouldn’t try to parlay this discovery into leniency at sentencing? I don’t think so. I think Comey convinced himself that he had to know the unknown. And to find that out would take a warrant for the laptop.

And for a warrant, he had to re-open the investigation.

Not what he wanted to do, but too bad Hillary, self preservation rules.

There are four precincts being heard in determining what’s best for our country vis-à-vis releasing the memo.

First, Devon Nunes, one of the document’s authors, and the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee that voted to release it. A Republican and a partisan, Nunes seems out of his depth both procedurally and politically in managing this committee’s yearlong effort into an array of overlapping issues. His springtime gaff in preemptively sharing classified intelligence learned from White House sources during the short-lived “unmasking scandal” made him appear somewhat unhinged and resulted in his temporary recusal from the committee he chairs. He thinks the American people need to see this memo and stands by every word as unshakable fact.

Second, Nunes’ counterpart, Adam Schiff, is a California Democrat, which instinctively has one cast a wary eye. He has denigrated every effort by the committee and its chairman to bring about any consensus conclusion. The stonewalling of the Deep State in its withholding of documents and failure to produce witnesses goes unaddressed by Schiff. Instead, he obsesses to every open mic that the committee’s work has proceeded solely to undermine the Mueller investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russia, making one unsubstantiated charge after another. He says the memo is a pack of lies and should not be released for fear it will compromise national security. He is preparing his own memo for release.

The third arbiter, of course, is the Executive Branch and the President has been unambiguous in his thinking that the memo should be released. After all, he has read it, he knows there is nothing in it damaging to him, and he knows its content will cast his antagonists at Justice and the FBI in an unfavorable light. Win, win. But not really; because if the release somehow does derail Mueller by demonstrating the Mueller probe was born of an underhanded bias and criminal manipulation of the FISA Court, then Mueller could be disbanded. Trump would never be vindicated, and cries from the left that Trump cheated justice will reverberate throughout the mid-terms, and the Democrats will campaign for the House with the argument that impeachment is the last vestige of remedy. And the Trump-haters will buy it

Lastly, we have the DOJ and the FBI. They, too, do not support release, claiming that the document contains”inaccuracies and omissions” harmful to national security and the government institutions (i.e. Justice and the FBI) that protect us. Ironically, it is purported the memo makes a case that the FBI and Justice Department colluded in presenting evidence to a FISA Court that contains “inaccuracies and omissions” to mislead the court into granting a warrant to electronically surveil one Carter Page, an American citizen with business interests in Russia who held an advisory role on the periphery of the Trump campaign. Should these charges be proven correct, then those responsible for FISA Court abuses, possibly Bruce Ohr at Justice and James Comey, Andrew McCabe, et al at the FBI, could face criminal charges. So asking Ohr’s boss, Rod Rosenstein, and McCabe’s boss, Christopher Wray, to pass judgment on the providence of releasing this memo is as suspect as the three competing agendas detailed above.

Now the voice yet to be heard should be the loudest: the media. Perhaps if Tom Hanks were really the editor of the Washington Post, as in the big screen’s salute to journalistic integrity, The Post, he could bring some Ben Bradlee-esque gravitas to this conundrum. After all, it was the Washington Post and the New York Times that railed for the release of the Pentagon Papers, a document thought to be damaging to the nation’s security as well, in wartime no less! But here, silence. Even the potential for government abuse that is being bandied about: spying on Americans and lying to the court; malfeasance at the FBI and Justice Department, a Deep State leveraging of surveillance assets for political gain, at the height of a presidential election no less; the harbinger of a looming constitutional crisis resulting from a special counsel; why, there’s not a mystery novelist born who wouldn’t take a crack at this one. And yet, crickets from the journalist elites.

And to revisit the topic of the FBI for a minute, isn’t it time we rid ourselves of the J Edgar Hoover fairy tale? This was a man who secretly spied and collected dirt to muzzle his critics and build an unassailable position of power in government. It is Hoover’s DNA that runs through the Bureau, and it is that legacy of absolute power corrupting absolutely that we may be seeing manifested today.

Since we’re so mindful of taking down statues and memorials, perhaps we should think about renaming the FBI Building, instead of commemorating the Father of the Deep State. Maybe one day (and for good reason) it will be called the Inspector General Michael Horowitz building.