Mass shootings: Solution(s)
Is there just ONE thing that needs to be done to end (severely lessen, tbh) mass shootings, or is it a matter of fixing several things for a complete solution?
Leaving the question open and not naming any possibilities, although you are certainly free to mention them if you like.
I was tempted to say it is too complex and will never be solved, but I chose multiple fixes instead.
Not that I think it will or can be "fixed" 100%, but reduced a great deal yes.
Some good points have been raised by some previous posters... here's my list.
1. Minimum 5 armed guards per school, of one sort or another. Whether this is volunteer teachers, principles, coaches, administrators or hired guards, whichever. Frankly I'd prefer armed guards as their full-time attention would be on security, but training/arming some staff would be far cheaper and people bitch about the cost, even though it would be less than 3% of current school spending nationwide. This would act as a powerful deterrent and also as a safeguard if someone tried anyway. What's the first thing schools do when there is an active shooter? Call the good-guys-with-guns (police), who take too long to get there and too long to act, compared to armed protectors already inside...
2. Improve background check data... work on making sure criminal convictions get added to NICS along with treatment for addiction or serious mental illness where the subject is deemed a potential danger to others. That last bit is tricky and would have to be done carefully to avoid trampling rights, but it would help.
3. Everyone from police and government to parents and students, stop ignoring red flags! Take positive action when they are encountered.
4. Address our inadequate mental health infrastructure and failure to institutionalize dangerously ill people. We gutted our mental hospitals and system in the 80s, clearly that was a mistake.
5. It isn't the guns; we've had those forever. We didn't have mass school shootings of this frequency until rather recently.... consider what changed. Fifty years ago we taught morality as an absolute rather than a mushy mass of relativism; had civics classes that taught not just your rights as a citizen but your DUTIES as a citizen; and we had considerably more discipline in schools and more willingness to remove habitual troublemakers quickly. We also had almost no school shootings.
The part that keeps me up at night is that we show all the signs of a sick society, perhaps a terminally ill one. We have individuals like this Cruz, with all his red flags and dozens of police incidents going un-addressed until he murders 17 people. Then we turn around and blame everything and everyone EXCEPT
the person who did it... as if individuals have no agency or responsibility for their actions. We blame the AR-15, which was available 50 years ago when there were almost no school massacres like this, instead of asking what has changed. We won't look in the mirror and realize the world we've created is a mess. Yes we have done some good things in the past 50 years, correcting and addressing old wrongs and prejudices and oppression, but we went too far and "threw the baby out with the bath water"... we threw overboard our moral rudder, our ethical compass, and all our anchors of moral restraint and societal cohesion.
We dared think we could perfect humanity in the absence of any such absolutes, when the opposite is true, we're destroying our humanity. We're pointing the blame 180 degrees out of phase when the truth is we are collectively to blame, for thinking we can build a perfect society while throwing out the moral foundation of the past and substituting a Godless relativism, a lack of any moral absolutes and standards, in its place.
50 years ago there was considerable social pressure for parents to teach their children manners, respect, responsibility and morality. Today we deny anyone has any right to expect any such thing, and many actually celebrate how they're letting their children raise themselves without "imposing values on them".
We are reaping what we've sown. Ultimately no legislation, regulation or security plan will "solve" anything until we recognize that we planted this garden, and if we don't like the fruit it is our fault for the seeds we've sown.
Yeah I know, a lot of people won't like all that. We don't want to face what we've done or hear that we screwed up, that our post-modern humanism is to blame for destroying the foundations and replacing them with unstable rot, but it is the truth.