Whenever some long-standing problem rears its head again, it’s a common rhetorical gambit to blither about “parking ambulances at the bottom of a cliff”. Which begs the question: if you have a problem with jumpers, why wouldn’t you park an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff?
Sure, it makes sense in the long run to undertake to fix the problems of why people are jumping and what you can do to stop it. But in the meantime, what kind of arsehole is going to hold back the ambulance, and instead finger-wag the broken bodies?
But this is where we’re at in the school shooting debate in America. Everyone’s pushing their pet fixes. Most of them have at least some degree of plausibility – but almost all of them are incredibly long-term, and with dubious efficacy.
There is, though, one policy that would bring immediate and real benefits – and it’s the one the left are most adamantly opposed to. To return to the ambulance-and-cliff analogy, the argument goes: why not build a fence at the cliff instead?
Firstly, though, let’s quickly run through the other proposed solutions.
Stricter gun laws? Maybe, but the effects will take years, if ever, to filter through.
Enforcing existing laws that in theory keep felons and the mentally ill from owning guns would certainly catch some potential shooters. But mass shooters aren’t impulsive street thugs; their crimes are not of opportunity but premeditation. They’re clever and determined; one way or another, they’ll get guns. Doesn’t mean we need to make it easy for ’em.
More importantly, as David Cole points out:
Leftists who rail against free speech because it leads to ‘bad things’ (“disinformation”, “hate speech”) have popularized the notion that the presence of a downside means a freedom must be curtailed. Don’t buy into that argument. Acknowledge the downsides, and admit that, to an extent, they’re always gonna be with us.
Broken families, mental health or, conversely, over-medication are at best only partial explanations. Some shooters come from single parent families, yes, but others come from intact but violent and dysfunctional – and some of the most notorious, like the Columbine killers, came from intact, apparently happy families. Similarly, Eric Harris, the mastermind of the Columbine pair, was intelligent and highly functional. Sure, he was on medication for depression (clearly, his parents cared about their son), but other shooters weren’t.
Jaylen Fryberg (football star, homecoming prince) was just pissed off about a girl. A hundred postmortems, and not a trace of diagnosable mental illness in his past […]
Rigorous parental oversight (what the Uvalde psycho lacked) is the best defense (though as proven by Harris, Klebold, Elliot Rodger, and others, it’s no cure-all). Common sense helps too: don’t buy your tard a gun or make guns available to them (Gendron, Lanza). And indeed, society must make it easier to lock away the poo-flingers (Lanza, Cho). But just as it’s legal for law-abiding citizens to own guns, it’s legal for teens to be depressed, sullen, angry, awkward and even creepy. Indeed, such things are so common in teens, by themselves they fail as red flags.
There is a better argument for media coverage exacerbating shootings. Forget the nonsense about violent video games and movies (Japan is the best argument against that one), but acknowledge that shootings come in clusters. So, what – are we going to ban media reporting shootings at all?
But this does tangentially bring us to what will at least work best in the short term.
Teenagers are followers. Faddists. As Cole puts it, “teens are prone to fads, which is because teens are very, very stupid. They are tiny-brained, feebleminded followers who rarely think things through.” The effect of “social contagion” is well known to psychologists. It almost certainly explains the explosion in “transgenderism” in teenagers.
So, wouldn’t the most sensible immediate course of action be to stop the fad in its tracks? Build a fence at the top of the cliff, indeed.
Ever since Oct. 1, 1997, when vice principal Joel Myrick stopped the Pearl, Miss., high school shooting by holding his Colt .45 to the teen shooter’s head, the second best way to stop a school shooting has been well-known. The first best is prevention. The Pearl shooter had leaked his plan in advance to his friends (as 48 per cent of shooters do), but they told no one.
Armed professionals on campus and tips to law enforcement are not panaceas, but they’re the intelligent response of a society dealing with a phenomenon with no single cause […]
Whatever the “why”, just stop it from happening.
Takimag
This is the intelligent response of Israel’s Iron Dome. Does it solve the wicked problem of Palestine? Hell, no – but it stops Israeli citizens being indiscriminately slaughtered by Hamas’ rain of rockets. Is it right that Israelis have to live under an Iron Dome? No, but would they want to live without it?
Of course, the armed professionals at Uvalde were less than useless, which probably says more about the comprehensive collapse of American policing thanks to the BLM narrative. But the off-duty Border Patrol hero proved that a good guy with a gun will at least stop a shooter in his tracks.
Once you’ve called a halt to the current wave of shootings, then you can have the luxury of arguing over whatever else your pet fix might be. At least more kids will be alive in the interim.
