In the satiric 1944 book "Barefoot Boy with Cheek" by Max Shulman (who would go on to create TV's Dobie Gillis), the protagonist, Asa Hearthrug, is a young man starting school at the "fictional" University of Minnesota. He is not exactly a rocket scientist, and completely naive as well.
A lot of the book is Asa's narrative to the reader of his thoughts as he goes through his first year's college experiences. In one case, he relates to the reader his ability to learn from experience ... sort of. For example, having once been kicked in the head by a horse while looking for angleworms, Asa assures us that has never happened again. "Of course", he mentions, "I've been kicked in the head by a horse on many other occasions, but never again while looking for angleworms."
Perhaps it is a stretch to mention that quote in light of the school shooting last week, but somewhere in my senile-adjacent mind, it may make sense before this piece is over.
There was a shooting in a school in Texas last week, as you know. The young man who did it is in custody, and classmates are dead. Sadly, that is nothing new. School shootings appear to be both commonplace and frustratingly difficult to prevent. We know, for example, that our intelligence and criminal justice services have prevented a large number of attacks by ISIS and other Islamist scum. But has even one school shooting been prevented? Do we know?
The Hollywood types are, of course, in full force with their "We have to do something about guns" line, even though in the several interviews I've seen, not one of them, nor their leftist operative cohorts, can come up with a firearms law that would have prevented this, or most of the other school shootings. In this case, the guns were stolen, so purchase laws wouldn't have done squat in the Texas case.
But what I want to get across is that they are waving around a solution in search of a problem -- and truthfully, they're not even presenting an actual solution, at least any more detailed than "common-sense gun laws", which is not detailed at all.
It occurred to me that "a" problem was that they have not properly defined "the" problem, if that made sense to you.
The problem, properly defined, is school shootings. It is not "guns in schools" or any variation on that theme. It is actually the fact that people are killing other people in schools, and while murdering is not good in any context, school children are thought of as innocents, and it offends all our sensibilities when innocents are murdered ... at least as long as they are not unborn innocents.
So a solution to the problem of school shootings, properly defined, requires steps that logically would result in no school shootings. The guns themselves don't do anything without someone who wants to use them to kill. To solve the problem, properly defined, we need to identify the common characteristics of the shootings to date -- why they did it, what signs were there, that sort of thing -- and then develop alerts to those commonalities to prevent future school attacks.
Since the guns don't fire themselves, not one of the school shootings is reliant only on a gun. They all happened because of a conscious decision by a human being with a problem, and pretty much all the time, the person gave some signal that it was going to happen, up to and including writing on social media that they were going to commit a school shooting. Then ... crickets.
None of us wants another school shooting to happen. But if we want that to happen, or not to happen, we have to focus on solutions that (A) address the actual problem, and (B) have a reasonable expectation of working as a solution. If you think the problem is "that there are guns around", well, you're going to see nothing else. The only solution there is to confiscate every firearm in the nation, ban their importation and manufacture, and institute capital penalties for mere ownership. That ain't gonna happen.
However, if you think the problem is "school shootings", then there are reasonable approaches -- I hesitate to say "solutions" -- to preventing them. They all, every one, have to do with addressing the shooter, and that means recognizing the signs from the standpoint of prevention.
I'm right there with everyone who wants to help by preventing firearm sales to people who shouldn't own firearms. As long as the government can reliably and very quickly identify people with the appropriate issues -- mental health issues, felonies, dishonorable discharge from the military, history of threats on Facebook -- then I have no problem banning sales to them, again, as long as people without those issues can be quickly verified.
I have no problem linking the big social media companies with the FBI and law enforcement to develop and have an active "no buy list" accessible at the point of sale, because I have no problem with those companies actively reporting threatening behavior and postings that show a risk of threatening activity. I think all of that can be managed reasonably such that people like that can no longer be allowed to be armed.
But those solutions address the person, not the weapon. That's because the problem is the person. If the left really wants to solve the problem -- and believe me, conservatives want to solve it just as much (probably more; unlike the left, we want to solve problems), we just don't express ourselves stupidly -- they will allow the problem to be defined properly. They don't want it solved, of course, since the big government they want is threatened by an armed citizenry, which is why there is a Second Amendment.
Asa Hearthrug thought that the problem was that he had been picking angleworms, and that's why he got kicked in the head by a horse. He missed the part about, you know, staying away from horses, or at least not bending over when there are horses around. His solution addressed the wrong definition of the problem.
It's the same here. I want there never to be another school shooting. I'm open to an approach that has a reason for us to believe that it will work. And that is only going to come when the problem is properly named and identified.
The problem is the shooter, but it is also the left, who doesn't want it solved.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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