If someone breaks into your home wishing to do you harm, your best chance is to be armed. Sure, you can call the police, but they’re minutes away at best, and anything can happen between the time you call for help and the time they arrive.
Many people also have security systems, which may be a deterrent to some, but certainly not all, criminals. In the end, if you want to be safe, get trained and get armed.
Unfortunately, not enough Americans see it that way — even after tragedies like what happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. After the initial shock, there’s the universal desire to prevent such things from happening again.
It’s been 23 years since the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
It’s been 10 years since the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.
Clearly, nothing that has been done since then has managed to stop shootings from happening. Why? Because the most popular response to these shootings is to blame pretty much anyone but the shooter — which is exactly what Joe Biden did on Tuesday in his reaction to the latest school shooting.
“So, tonight, I ask the nation to pray for them, to give the parents and siblings the strength in the darkness they feel right now,” he said. “As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
In the same statement in which Biden declared we must stand up to the gun lobby — in other words, enact strong gun control — in the wake of the shooting, he also managed to prove that gun control doesn’t work.
“I spent my career as a senator and as Vice President working to pass commonsense gun laws,” he said.
Well, they didn’t exactly work, did they? Biden then made the oft-repeated claim that the assault weapons ban that was passed in 1994 reduced mass shootings, and when the law expired they went back up. I’m not sure how many times this has been debunked, but it seems that the truth won’t stop Biden from making this false claim repeatedly.
If there’s anything that’s clear, the usual cycle of a mass shooting followed by more gun control followed by a mass shooting followed by more gun control hasn’t worked for decades to solve the problem, has it?
The obvious answer to preventing these tragedies is to harden these soft targets.
“The reality is, we don’t have the resources to have law enforcement at every school,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told Fox News. “It takes time for law enforcement, no matter how prepared, no matter how good they are to get there. So, having the right training for some of these people at the school is the best hope.”
Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen. According to a 2018 National Education Association poll, roughly three out of four educators oppose arming teachers and school staff. Overall, 59% of Americans are also opposed to the idea.
The problem is that Americans are being taught to fear guns, not respect them. But ultimately, Americans need to ask themselves if they truly want to break the cycle and end school shootings. Schools are targeted because they soft targets, and it’s about time we harden them for the safety of our kids.