According to several news reports, the Santa Fe, Texas, high school where nine students and an adult were killed Friday morning in the latest school massacre had been recognized for safety measures its staff had taken. The school also had security officers on duty.
Obviously, those precautions were not sufficient to prevent the horrible event.
So, what can we do, short of adopting police state measures.
Three things have been mentioned prominently in the past several months:
1) raising the age for purchase of firearms to 21; 2) elevating the thoroughness of background checks; 3) removing from the public sphere bump-stocks, devices that increase the firing frequency of semi-automatic rifles.
Weve no argument with any of those, but none would have stopped the student who came to school Friday meaning to kill classmates and/or teachers.
He used a shotgun and a .38 caliber handgun belonging to his father that had been purchased legally.
In most previous mass shootings the weapon of choice has been an assault rifle. ARs are devastating weapons designed primary for suppressive fire on the battlefield. An effort to limit their purchase by the general public has been proposed, and one day might come about. However, about 15 million of the high-powered rifles, for which high-capacity magazines are available, already are in the hands of John Q. Public, and taking them away, no matter the premium paid in a government buy-back, would be an exercise in futility.
That a shotgun was used in the Santa Fe school shooting isnt without precedent a student at a middle school in Roswell, N.M., used a shotgun to wound several students and if they surface more in the hands of those bent on creating mayhem, routes to prevention of such heinous crimes will have many more twists, turns and barriers.
Shotguns are commonly used in hunting. With limited range, they arent thought of in the same light as high-powered rifles or handguns. Also, they are easily obtained.
SO, THAT leaves us with the questions that nag school officials, law enforcement officers, lawmakers of every stripe and legions of parents every well-meaning person who draws a breathe.
The first comment off the lips of many when such a shooting occurs is we need gun control.
The retort: In what form and how would it be accomplished. Such a proposal is light years from being a solution.
Guns, of one nature or another, have a ubiquity hard to fathom. Estimates put the total in the U.S. at well over 300 million.
A common thread that runs through commentaries about how to keep mass shootings domestic shootings of any nature from occurring is to recognize well ahead of time those who would be perpetrators.
Frequently those who have carried out such acts of violence have given clues that, unfortunately, usually surface after the fact rants, antisocial behavior and often in lucid posts on any number of social media sites.
