I have lots of ideas about how to fix this problem as well as many problems of our children and schools.
My children attended TC Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. This was in the early 1990s. If you remember the movie "Remember the Titans" the Titans" were the TC Williams High School football team. This school was for grades Sophomore, Juniors and Seniors. There were over 4,000 kids in this school About 50% were African Americans, 25% were white and the remaining 25% spoke some 50 different languages. It was a melting pot school
In 1991, to enter the school you went through metal detectors. No way to get in without passing a metal detector. That was a good start. My guess is today we have many schools without open entrances where anyone can enter the school.
This would be a good start. I'm all for highly trained law enforcement in our schools. It is sad that it has come to this, but it is clear that we need to harden our schools.
I'm all for teachers and other school support personnel to go through weapons training and be allowed to carry in their schools. The caveat is that the training must be Cleet or better. I have a carry conceal permit and the required training simply isn't sufficient for school protection and safety.
However, this issue is way more complex then just trained law enforcement and weapons training for teachers. This gun issue in schools is very difficult.
I firmly believe that the following are contributors to the situation we currently find our selves.
First, is parents. We have parents who have zero discipline at home. We have parents who don't read to their kids. We have parents who don't feed their children a breakfast before they go to school. We have parents who aren't home when their kids get home from school.
We flat out have many parents who don't give a damn about their kids or their education.
We don't have any discipline in our schools. We allow the thugs to disrupt our classrooms. Schools are no longer all about educating our children. They are babysitters and on and on. We have drugs in our schools and children bringing in weapons into our schools on a daily basis. I have a friend who is a principal at a middle school in West Oklahoma City. She spends every day dealing with kids fighting, their parents [when she can find them] and the police. We pay her $40,000/year to mediate troubled children who create havoc in her school.
We simply don't have the will to fix these problems.
We have people in authority who can't do their jobs. Just like the Sheriff in Florida on this recent school killing. He blamed the FBI, he blamed the NRA, he blamed everyone, but his own Sheriff's office. Now, we learn that he had at least three deputies at that school who were outside the school and failed to enter the school and kill the killer. We learned his officers at visited this kid over 30 times and did absolutely nothing.
We have people who blame gun owners and the NRA for all of this. They want more and stronger background checks. They don't know that it was the NRA that was responsible for the background checks we currently have. The NRA wrote a strong background check law, but the US Congress cut the guts out of it.
In Chicago we have killings that could easily be stopped if the Chicago leadership had the guts to take the guns away from the felons who have illegal guns, but they won't do it.
The reality is we have plenty of laws, but they aren't enforced. We have these sanctuary cities who are simply protecting illegals and illegal criminals.
How can we have law and order in our country when we have cities how refuse to enforce our existing laws?
We want to get the folks with mental issues to not be able to purchase guns. But, we have laws on the books -- HIPRA laws that prohibit medical professionals from sharing information. How smart is that.
On the flip side, we allow the medical community to do all of this and then we have the left wing who will just use it for their own political agenda.
We have the first and second amendment that are the bedrock of our constitution. We allow individuals to use their ideology to harm others and we doom ourselves.
I'm 76 years old. I have owned guns since I was seven years old. I have never known a person who used a gun to kill another person. I only know of one gun accident that resulted in a death. I know hundreds of people who own guns who are solid citizens. A room full of people with carry conceal permits is the safest place to be.
My point is that this issue is very complicated issue and there is no simple solution to it.
As a lifetime NRA member, I am for keeping guns out of the hands of felons. I am for finding ways to ensure that every person who fills out the back ground check required to purchase a weapon is in our background system. I am for finding ways to ensure that mentally unstable people aren't ever in control of a gun. I am for banning such things as the Bump Stock that has gotten so much attention since the Nevada episode.
I am for eliminating these horrible video games so many of our children are addicted. No one will ever convince me that a 10 year old kid sitting behind a screen playing some of these violent game where he is taking out humans and animals. Months and years this has to desensitize these kids to killing.
What is the gain from these kinds of games?
What about these violent movies and series that are all over Netflix, Amazon and on and on. Yet this filth is available to every child who is home alone without any parental supervision.
I'm tired of actors like Samuel Jackson telling us what to do. Anyone watch Pulp Fiction? Who in the hell thinks that Samuel Jackson is someone to lecture me on guns? What a hypocrite. And, he isn't the only one.
Hollywood is just a cesspool of filth. I'm really tired of one of these Hollywood types who die of drug overdose who are held up as great people we should admire.
And, then we have a recent President who turned a couple of thousands gun toting drug dealing felons out of federal prisons.
We have a recent President and Attorney General who gave Mexican Drug Cartels hundreds of guns, resulting in Border Control Agents to be murdered by those guns. Fast and Furious was an attempt to have guns killing innocents for the purpose of their Gun Control Agenda.
Fixing this issue isn't going to be easy.
