Lloyd shares his thoughts on the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and why protecting our kids isn't a priority in Congress.
So, this week, we saw another school shooting. this time in Parkland, Florida, about 50 miles north of Miami.
A disturbed 19-yr-old, who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons, was not allowed on campus with a backpack because of concerns, had a history of mental illness, who was apparently angry about being bullied, and who flew massive red flags on social media took a rifle and lots of magazines to his old school, pulled the fire alarms to get everyone out into the halls, and began opening fire.
He killed 17, and wounded another 15 in the 15 minutes it took police to respond.
In the end, he was too big a coward to eat a bullet himself, and was arrested without being injured himself.
At age 19, the shooter was prohibited from owning a handgun. Unlike Trayvon martin, who posed with real guns he was not allowed to own, this week’s shooter posed with airsoft and pellet guns. But, in one photo which he captioned his “arsenal”, he did have two shotguns, two hunting rifles, and an AR-15 pattern rifle.
Where he acquired his rifles, we do not yet know. The minimum age to purchase or possess a long gun in Florida is 18.
Students at his former school say they all knew he was a time bomb. That they all saw it coming.
He was angry. He was weird. He was always getting into trouble. Ultimately, he was expelled and staff was warned not to allow him on campus with a backpack. So, the school saw it coming, too.
It’s not legal to open carry in Florida. Yet he did openly carry the rifle to the school. It’s illegal to carry a firearm onto school property. And yet he did.
It’s not legal to shoot people unless it’s an act of self-defense. He did that as well.
Chelsea handler and other leftist harpies immediately blamed the NRA. Which shows you what a moronic broken record the left has become when it comes to violence in America.
The Left has their mantras. Background checks. Gun bans. Magazine capacity bans. Blame the NRA. All of it bullshit.
But the Right has their own mantras, as well. It’s a mental health issue. You can’t legislate evil. Good guys with guns. Background checks are an infringement of muh rights.
Much of the right’s favorite catch-phrases are bullshit too.
In this case, it was a mental health issue. As was the case in aurora, Tucson, and Newtown.
But in all those cases, like this one, the killers were not in the system. Not because the system failed. But because there was no reason for them to be there.
You must be committed to a mental institution, or be a felon, or a domestic abuser or have a protective order against you to be denied your 2A rights. None of those applied to the shooter this week.
He had apparently seen a mental health therapist, but had never been adjudicated mentally ill or committed to a mental institution. So, how do we stop it? What could have stopped this?
Ignore the idiotic ideas on the left about bans and background checks.
Like the killers at columbine, this kid was apparently bullied. combined with mental illness, and the recent death of his mother, the fuse for this kid was lit. and it was short.
At what point could this have been stopped?
The fact is, criminal record or mental illness or none, someone evil enough to consider killing their former classmates at school will find a way to do it.
At one of the schools in a system where my wife once worked, a student was found to be plotting a mass-casualty attack. The most detailed plan local law enforcement had ever seen. It didn’t involve knives, or guns. it involved blocking the school’s exits and releasing an airborne toxin, a gas made from household chemicals, fed into the school’s air handling systems. This disturbed student didn’t plan to shoot up the school. That student planned to exterminate every person on the campus like the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
She didn’t need a gun. You heard me right…she didn’t need a gun. Her sick plan did not include one.
Fortunately, someone discovered her plan and reported it to authorities.
Evil will find a way.
But our answer can’t stop there. It can’t be to throw up our hands and say, “you can’t legislate evil,” or “we live in a wicked world.” Those things are true. evil exists and it will find a way. The sin in the heart of man is the reason men and women do such terrible things to each other. So, what do we do?
Taking away guns from people who do not abuse their rights is not the answer. Killers steal, make and find weapons whether you ban them or not.
Magazine capacity bans? The shooter had “countless magazines” according to the local sheriff. Although they have counted them so it’s not like he had a bag of holding from D&D with a warehouse full of mags inside. But clearly, he had a bunch. Like the shooter at VA tech or the one at Sutherland springs. Since he had time to reload multiple times, it doesn’t matter.
So, again, what can we do? The sad truth is that acts of evil cannot be prevented. And in this sick society we have created, it should not be surprising. It should be expected.
No, children should never feel unsafe in an American school. or any school for that matter. but from Beslan, to Bath Township, to Columbine, to Monash University, to Kauhajoki, Finland, or Emsdetten, Germany, or Dunblane, Scotland, children have been killed in the places they should have been safe. at school. Why? because schools are easy targets for mass killers.
There are never armed citizens, thanks to the gun free school zones act. There’s almost never an armed guard or resource officer. The targets, students and teachers, have limited ability to escape. The hallways make it easy to funnel targets into fields of fire. And police will not arrive in time to prevent you from killing lots of people. At this Florida school, it was 15 minutes. By that time, the shooter killed 17, wounded 15, then blended in with his intended victims as they were evacuating.
What law would stop this evil? Nothing.
You could raise the minimum age to purchase a long gun to 21. Except for members of the military or law enforcement who are under 21, I have no problem with this.
But more importantly, we could secure our schools.
How did this guy get into the school? Were exterior doors locked? If the school told staff to prevent him from coming on campus, how were they supposed to do that? What plans or precautions were in place to prevent him, or anyone else, from coming into that school with a weapon? He was wearing a gas mask, so maybe they didn’t realize it was him.
According to the national center for education statistics, there are over 98,000 public schools in the united states, elementary and secondary schools.
NCES stats for 2015-2016 show that 69% of schools had at least one violent incident on campus. 15% had at least one serious violent incident – rape, sexual assault, physical attacks or fights with weapons. 8% reported threats of physical attacks with weapons.
But despite those threats, just 72% of public schools has full or part time security on campus at least once a week. not every day. once a week. You may think, hey 72% is higher than I thought. That sounds high, right? Only 52% are sworn law enforcement. And of those, close to 20% are not armed. Only 43% of carry a firearm. Only 48% are full time. This means that over 23,000 schools don’t even have a part time, unarmed security guard.
After the Newtown massacre in 2012, the NRA proposed a solution called national school shield. Because the idea didn’t involve gun control and it was proposed by the eeeevil NRA, it was lampooned and ignored. In the six years since, what have we done? Not much. During that time, we have had numerous school shootings and the democrats continue to tilt at windmills, hoping just one more tragedy will move public opinion on gun control. the politics are the important thing. not your kids.
School Shield trained its first school three years after Newtown and has apparently done nothing since. either the program is dead, or it was never serious and was just a publicity stunt to divert attention from the gun control debate. From what I can see, it just withered on the vine. There’s no indication, aside from a video and a place to donate money, that the program is even active anymore. My guess is that nobody, not even the NRA, took it seriously.
If you want to save lives, we need to secure our schools. Hiring 98,000 officers at let’s say 35000 per year would be a 3.4 billion dollar a year program. That’s a lot of money, I can hear you say. Well, consider that federal agencies waste over 100 billion a year in erroneous tax refunds, Medicare payments and unemployment benefits to people who have jobs. The us government spends nearly 7 million dollars every minute. The department of veteran’s affairs spends nearly 200 million a year on buildings they don’t use. We spent 2 million dollars apiece to train 145 moderate Syrian rebels during the Obama admin. The DOD spent 2 million to develop robots that can play jazz.
With the money we wasted on the F-35 joint strike fighter, we could have funded armed schools resource officers for every school in America for 130,000 years.
The point is, we would rather waste money on studying world of Warcraft, or cow farts, or studying male prostitutes in Vietnam, or genital washing programs in South Africa or to help Pakistani mango farmers…than we would to protect our children.
Because if we protected our kids, where would Democrats get the dead kids they need to push for gun control?
