I was on a family vacation in California when I heard the news that another school shooting occurred in Uvalde, TX. Long story short, an 18 year old young man had bought two guns and a bunch of ammo beforehand and then began his evil day by shooting his grandmother in the face (she survived). He was pursued by police and crashed his car before entering into an elementary school. He locked himself in a classroom and open fired on teachers and students, killing a total of 19 kids and two teachers before an off-duty border patrol agent entered the room and shot him. It’s a horrifying event that has led to a lot of sadness, anger, and finger-pointing.
I’ve written on school shootings before but more from a theological viewpoint of processing evil, and I also wrote one imploring people to have better discussions by avoiding cheap virtue-signaling and approaching the topic with sober-minded analysis. I’ll try the latter again, though oftentimes, even telling people to stop screaming slogans or that their loud social media presence doesn’t make them better people tends to make them angrier.
I’m going to say this as gently as I can: Spewing uninformed takes doesn’t make you virtuous, nor does it prove that you care more than people who disagree with you. Let’s start with the pretty obvious assumption that most everyone is horrified and mad about what happened, so let’s hit the brakes on accusing other people of bad motives. We also have to understand that A. It’s going to take a multifaceted approach to try to curb these kinds of shootings and not just hyper-focus on one aspect B. Laws rarely work at all times for everyone, so there are usually downsides and trade-offs to consider and C. There will always be a human element involved, so even policies in place to stop shootings can fail when people don’t do their jobs. That’s the world we live in.
In any case, a multifaceted approach will have to encompass at least these things: The home, gun laws, school security, law enforcement, and mental health. Let’s go through them in turn:
The Home
School shooters in particular tend to fit a certain profile: Young men who are loners, angry, have a history of violent tendencies, and who come from broken homes of some sort. This shooter fit all of that to a T. This has led to many conservatives harping on the need to strengthen the nuclear family, which has fallen in importance in American life for years now.
While I agree the nuclear family is important and the lack of good father figures is concerning, this is something that is difficult to legislate. You can make a father pay but can’t make him stay, for example. This can and should be a societal emphasis by Christians and research keeps showing that parenting is still the most impactful factor for how kids turn out, but we also can’t just harp on the family and ignore other possible policy proposals.
Gun Laws
Talking about gun control is exceptionally annoying because most people who clamor for alleged “common sense gun laws” don’t seem to know anything about guns and have gotten their ideas from Hollywood. Nor do they seem to be aware of what existing laws are in place. I’m no gun expert myself, but I know enough to avoid these empty talking points:
- We need background checks! (already federal law)
- Ban automatic weapons! (already banned)
- Ban semiautomatic weapons! (said by people who don’t know what “semiautomatic” means)
- Ban assault rifles! (said by people who can’t define “assault rifle” beyond “it looks scary!”. Also worth noting that the Virginia Tech shooter killed 33 people with pistols)
- Ban all guns (there’s something called the 2nd amendment that’d make that deeply impractical, plus the fact that there’s an estimated 400 million guns in the US).
And so forth. The “DO SOMETHING” crowd is really not helpful in trying to tackle this issue with nuance. We already have something like 20,000 different gun laws throughout the country, and simply enforcing the ones we already have better could go a long way. For example, one of the church shooters a few years ago was able to buy a gun despite being dishonorably discharged from the military, which should have come up in his background check. Somebody screwed up and that was not put in his profile. That’s not a law problem, that’s a human error problem.
Furthermore, the tricky part about blanket gun laws is that there are those pesky trade-offs I mentioned above and unintended consequences that we have to consider. Example: A woman feared her ex-boyfriend and tried to buy a gun, and she had to go through a waiting period to get her gun permit. In that intervening period, the man attacked and stabbed her. These considerations should inject some humility in this debate as we weigh all the costs. In addition, school shootings, as horrifying as they are, are rare and comprise a tiny percentage of gun-related murders in America, which again should caution against knee-jerk reactions.
That said, I think people who refuse to consider ANY gun reform to be silly, and merely pointing out that school shootings are rare doesn’t mean that there can’t be any new laws. Rare events can be terrible enough to warrant a lot of guardrails against them, like plane crashes, and mass shootings at schools, churches, and the like deeply disturb us because they violate places that are supposed to be safe. This is not to say that the lives of people getting shot in the streets are worth less; it’s only to say that it’s deeply disturbing when places of safety are violated and it can warrant legislation.
I think the most interesting proposals are ones that are targeted towards the most likely kind of shooter, which is the young man I described above. There are already some restrictions for 18 year olds (can’t conceal and carry in many states), and there seems to be some good reason to expand that a bit more. The fact that this shooter could buy two rifles plus a bunch of ammo right after his 18th birthday seems a bit much, and one wonders why it didn’t raise any red flags. Something like restricting how many guns and how much ammo an 18-21 year old can buy seems reasonable and maybe would not run afoul of the second amendment. Maybe a massive surcharge for anyone under 21 or 25, similar to how under-25 year olds have to pay more for car insurance, could dissuade easy purchases. A waiting period could also be enforced. There would be obvious exceptions to this (18 year olds in the military), but by and large, watching young people who try to get guns with more scrutiny could be a helpful step.
We nonetheless have to understand that most school shooters got their guns illegally, so this won’t stop all of them.
School security
Another sad aspect of this shooting was how so many things failed at once. One such failure was that the backdoor of the school was reportedly propped open, giving the shooter easy access. This was against school policy and is yet another example of human error despite rules being in place.
School security needs some attention and teachers and administrators need to be trained on how important it is. Keeping such doors locked is a start, and having more armed security (that are trained well) can help. Single point access is also a possibility, and no, despite some ridiculous talking points, that is not a fire hazard (there are such things as doors that only open from the inside, the kind we see in all sorts of buildings already).
I am open to some teachers being armed because most mass shooters are cowards who pick their targets based on a perceived lack of resistance. That said, I am aware of the downside that all it takes is one idiot teacher to be careless with his weapon or even threaten a student with it for everyone to second-guess letting teachers carry.
Regardless, school security has to be taken seriously because while preventing shooters from being formed or getting a weapon is ideal, there has to be robust measures to stop them when those preventative measures fail.
Police
Yet another failure: After Sandy Hook, police protocols regarding school shooters changed. Before, they were to form a perimeter and wait for backup. Now, with the understanding that every second counts, police are supposed to engage the shooter as quickly as possible. The Uvalde police apparently failed to do so, probably due to bad orders from their superiors. Off-duty border patrol agents did more than they did to rescue students and stop the shooter.
I don’t want to Monday morning quarterback police from the safety of my chair, but while I don’t think police should be reckless and get shot for no reason, it would seem that if you sign up to be police, one of the things you agree to do is to face danger in order to rescue other people (especially children). It’s pretty terrible seeing the timeline and how the police failed to act when both parents and kids were desperate for their help.
Not sure what else to do but to continue better training and frankly fire some people who made massive mistakes. Every police department needs to hammer it home that officers cannot wait.
Mental health
There have been several studies that have shown a correlation between deinstitutionalization and violence. It makes sense: Put fewer people in mental health institutions and away from society, the more mentally messed up people there are walking around who might commit violence. That’s not to say we should go back to institutionalizing a ton of people because it should be a weighty decision to take away or restrict someone’s freedom, but it does point to the need to increase mental health care and access.
I’m not entirely sure how that would look, but there are a ton of red flags these shooters display and it seems nobody can or wants to do anything about them. Increased funding might be a good first step as well as better trained school counselors.
Side note: Thoughts and Prayers
I’ve seen a lot of snide remarks about “thoughts and prayers,” and while I agree we should not use that phrase flippantly, we as Christians should not be mocking genuine prayers. Prayer should be one of the primary things we turn to. We can look to do other things as well, but prayer matters. Ultimately, this is a human sin problem, and we aren’t going to totally fix it until Jesus comes back. Our final trust should be placed in him.
Conclusion
What happened was awful, and we need lawmakers and people on all sides to compromise and brainstorm real, practical solutions and not just grandstand on ideology or only focus on one point. Conservatives have to be willing to discuss new gun laws, and liberals have to understand that there has to be other considerations rather than their exceptionally vague “common sense gun laws.” Is that going to happen? Probably not, but one can hope.
leesomniac 