Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Feckless measures, rhetoric can’t combat epidemic of gun violence

california shooting

Ashley Landis / AP

Women pause at a memorial at a vigil honoring the victims of a shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio on Monday, Jan. 23, 2023, in Monterey Park, Calif. A gunman killed multiple people late Saturday amid Lunar New Years celebrations in the predominantly Asian American community.

In 2022, the United States had 647 mass shootings. Almost two per day.

Gun rights advocates have long argued that there are other means of protecting our public spaces from gun violence without infringing on Second Amendment rights. They argue that increased security, armed staff and better protocols and procedures for identifying security risks can serve as adequate substitutes for even the most benign gun control measures. Essentially, the pro-gun lobby argues in favor of infringing on a vast number of other liberties and increased surveillance of Americans to protect weapons in our culture.

Tragically, their commitment to gun rights blinds them to a readily apparent reality: Easy access to firearms encourages rash and unpredictable behavior that no amount societal preparation can prevent. Think about it: If criminal violence was easy to predict, easy to prepare for and easy to prevent, we wouldn’t have nightly news broadcasts filled with tragedy and accompanied by statements like “I had no idea, he didn’t seem like the type …”

Easy access to firearms — especially assault weapons designed to efficiently inflict maximum damage — make preventing gun deaths all but impossible.

Two weeks ago, we wrote about supposedly responsible and trustworthy adults leaving loaded guns unsecured in places where their kids can access them. While that editorial was focused on accidental shootings, those same failures by adults who legally purchase their weapons are also putting guns into the hands of homicidal mass murderers. And once armed, it’s unlikely any of the other preventive measures designed to identify and stop public shooters will work either.

Details emerged this week in the school shooting of a first-grade teacher in Newport News, Va., that reveal that administrators responsible for the safety of the students and school repeatedly downplayed and ignored warning signs of a disturbed 6-year-old with a gun on campus. The protocols were in place. Teachers and other students correctly identified a threat and reported it. Yet administrators failed to act and security was never notified.

The administrators’ astonishing negligence appear’ to stem from an all too often fatal form of denialism: the dangerous belief that “something like that would never happen here … not to me … not in this community … and certainly not involving a 6-year-old.” But yes, it does happen here. And there. And there too. Past that hill. Up your block. Right next door. It happens everywhere on a nearly nightly basis. This is the America the gun rights absolutists would have us endure.

The denialism was true at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a teacher reported a broken door lock that administrators failed to fix, providing a shooter access to the school. That first failure was compounded by several more. Upon arriving at the scene, one police officer failed to identify the shooter. Then as elementary school children called and texted messages of horror from inside a classroom where the gunman was killing them, the police froze. They cowered in the hallway, sacrificing precious minutes and precious lives to protect their own skin.

One 11-year-old survivor escaped by smearing herself in her friend’s blood and playing dead. Robb Elementary School’s armed school resource officer, aka its “good guy with a gun,” wasn’t even on site when the shooting began. But even if he had been, it’s not clear it would have mattered since dozens of other cops stood frozen during the massacre.

This is the fundamental bargain that gun rights absolutists have made with America: We get to keep our assault weapons and high-capacity magazines no matter what; America gets to suffer mass killings on a daily basis. That’s the deal. Our leaders accept it because they’re afraid of the gun rights absolutists, who are the minority, by the way. All involved might as well bathe in the blood of the victims.

Next month, the former school resource officer from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., will stand trial for his role in the 2018 massacre. He is charged with child neglect, culpable negligence and perjury after being accused of hiding from the gunman rather than engaging him, as was his sworn duty.

Even when armed security do engage shooters, they don’t always win the fight, especially when outgunned by an assault rifle or outdefended by body armor.

A security guard at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., lost his own life after engaging an armor-clad shooter. And while armed security at Santa Fe High School in Texas did successfully keep a shooter isolated in the arts wing of the campus, the shooter still had access to four classrooms, killing 10 students and injuring another 14.

All of which brings us back to guns.

Clearly, the locks, warning systems, threat assessment protocols and armed security aren’t working. Parents are failing to secure their weapons and prevent them from falling into the hands of children. School administrators are failing to take threats and vulnerabilities seriously. Armed security with pistols are not equipped to handle heavily armed gunmen carrying weapons of war and wearing body armor. Police are cowering in the hallway, keeping gunmen isolated but not neutralized.

And despite the pleas of most Americans for real solutions, the axis of gun-toting wannabe action heroes, greedy gun manufacturers and selfish GOP politicians continue to line their pockets with blood money paid for with the lives of our children and community members.

Systems that rely upon the swift and appropriate actions of supposedly responsible adults have failed far too often to ignore. It is illogical and downright idiotic to believe that implementing the same failed systems on a broader scale is the solution.

Instead, we should commit to a new strategy that does more to prevent shooters from obtaining tools of death and destruction in the first place. Assault weapons, bump stocks and high-capacity magazines should be banned, without exception. Universal background checks should be mandatory for all gun purchases, no exceptions and no loopholes. And people who claim to be responsible gun owners, but who fail to properly secure their weapons, should lose their right to possess them. Maybe then, the rest of the systems can become more effective.