The Kabuki Theater of Gun Control

February 28, 2018Politicaldonnyray

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.