Why We Continue to Have School Murders

Why have there been any more school murders in the USA since the attack at Columbine High School two decades ago? Violent attacks aren’t a mystery. We know why murderers kill. Narcissistic psychopaths and disgruntled sociopaths kill because the media turns these murderers into celebrities. We know the kind of targets they want. We know they will attack unarmed groups of people. We also know how to prevent and how to respond to these attacks. Why haven’t we adopted the measures that save our students? Neither the talking heads nor the politicians want to admit the truth. We have not stopped these rampages because the news media and political special-interests feed on mass murder.

That simple description hides some important details. As horrific as these mass murders are, they are unlikely to strike any particular campus. For perspective, we’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed in a mass murder in a public school. We have more than a half million school buildings so we can’t stack a SWAT team in every school hallway. Fortunately, we have solutions that work.

Criminologists and law enforcement specialists adapt police training each year as they evaluate new patterns of crime. These experts looked at the school mass murders and said law enforcement can’t get there in time. Often, these events are over before the police arrive so we need a number of armed first responders in the building before the event starts.

We’ve known how to stop mass murders in schools for the last six years. Why haven’t we put those solutions in place? For a problem to persist in the face of clear solutions means that special interests are benefiting from mass murder or we would have stopped it by now. Ask yourself who benefits from school murders.

Who benefits from school murders?

the News Media connection
If you read the murderers’ journals, doctor’s reports, and police interviews, then you can see a direct line from Dunblane, Scotland to Port Arthur, Australia to Columbine, Colorado, to Sandy Hook, Connecticut. The next mass murderer is inspired by the media coverage given to the last mass murder. Today, the US news media gives these murderers a billion dollars of publicity after they kill. We even changed our language to describe them. “Celebrity murderers” and “celebrity violence” are the terms we invented to describe these killers and what they do. Psychologists and media experts said that a third or more of these mass murders could be stopped if we changed media coverage.

We’ve done that before and we could do it again. The media protects the identity of rape victims. In a similar vein, refusing to mention their name and show their face has already worked to reduce teen suicides. So why didn’t we do something similar in order to stop mass murders in our schools?

Media coverage has gone beyond the public’s “need to know”.  Instead, the media exposure actively promotes the next mass murder. Why would the networks inspire evil? I think the media is desperate in the face of declining credibility and their dwindling number of viewers. Many of the major networks will say anything to keep us watching and to support their political agenda of gun-control.

The general principle of political Progressives is that any action is acceptable if it advances their agenda. What are a few hundred dead children if it helps to further the cause of a disarmed population. The Media will never have to pay reparations for dead teachers and children. Yes, politics is already involved in mass murder.

Gun-Control Politicians
The average citizen doesn’t know that we already have 23 thousand firearms regulations on the books. Each law, each regulation, was described as essential for public safety, yet politicians failed to deliver on that promise each and every time. Firearms prohibition hasn’t worked to stop violent crime or to stop mass murder.

Gun-control fails where ever it is tried. Gun-control in the Ukraine and Russia are far stricter than any legislation proposed in the United States, yet just a few months ago there was a mass school shooting in the Crimea.

All the wasted ink of legislation hasn’t kept blood off the floor. The political promises made in front of the TV cameras were hollow. Gun laws haven’t stopped the crazies and criminals from killing, so why do anti-gun Democrats propose more of the same failed ideas?

Progressives have always worked to undermine the idea of limited Government. Each school shooting brings calls for more gun-control. Destroying the Second Amendment is essential to the Progressive project because the Second Amendment is a constant rebuke to their primary goal of unlimited government power.

This isn’t speculation about actions that Socialists might take at some time in the future, but a prediction that Socialist politicians will continue to act as they have in the past. Under the Obama administration, executives in the US Department of Justice and State Department ran guns to mexican narco-terrorists in the hopes of passing stricter gun control legislation here in the US.

Democrat politicians enjoy personal as well as political payoffs after a mass murder at one of our schools. Like the murderers themselves, these politicians use each crisis to get more face time in front of the TV cameras. These politicians need a crisis to stay in office.

The Progressive Media and Progressive politicians both benefit financially from the carnage in our schools. The Media receives market share, clicks and views. The politicians receive millions of dollars in campaign contributions from anti-gun billionaires. This will continue as long as the Media and Politicians can hide their agenda behind a mask of altruism by saying they are working “for the children”.

Government Unions
Teachers unions uses our children in a deadly political game. Teachers unions are a tool of Progressive politics at worst. At best they are active supporters of big-government. Teachers unions hold our children hostage for their own financial gain and for political power. Teachers receiving security training or medical training to save lives violates union control over “work rules” even if the training is taken on a voluntary basis. This is why Democrats work to twist the narrative about defense of children into the false narrative of forcing teachers to have guns.

No one is suggesting that teachers should be forced to carry guns. The unions object, strongly, to armed volunteer staff in schools because trained volunteers carrying guns demonstrate that guns are useful for defense. That is a living demonstration that self-defense works and rebuts the Socialist narrative that only governments should be armed. Armed defenders also provide a positive role model for children and is anathema to the Progressive project.

The union’s goal is to maximize its power and wealth. Allowing volunteer first responders on campus works against the Union imperative to create as many separate and compartmentalized government positions as possible. It is important to the political goals of the teachers union that citizens be disarmed even if it costs the lives of a few hundred teachers and students.

Where are the Republican politicians in all this? After the next school shooting, Republicans politicians will be afraid of criticism from the Socialists, from government employee unions, and from the socialist media. Republicans are afraid to point out that gun control failed again. That doesn’t mean that gun control works. It means any alternative to bigger government and more gun-control will be shouted down. This isn’t a battle of ideas and consequences, but a battle of shouting voices on the weekend info-tainment shows that pass themselves off as news. Unfortunately, Republicans will win the support from Armed America by being marginally less anti-Second Amendment than the Socialists.

After his daughter was killed in a Florida high school, one surviving parent said this.

‘We have enough laws to stop these murders.
What we don’t have is any personal accountability to protect our children.’

That diversion of responsibility away from school staff and law enforcement isn’t an accident. We saw failure from every level of government at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Government failed from the FBI in Washington to the armed School Resource Officer at the schoolhouse door. Both progressive politicians and socialists unions need to keep the bureaucracy unaccountable for its perpetual failings. Again, this isn’t new behavior. One of the longstanding goals of teacher unions is to prevent accountability for teacher performance. Progressives deliberately reframe the narrative to gun-control after a deadly attack. This moves the focus from their responsibility and shifts attention to the NRA.

Unfortunately, the reports issued after these attacks don’t focus on these larger media and political problems. They often propose ineffective plans that wouldn’t have stopped the last attack and certainly won’t stop the next one. Let’s back that claim up with concrete examples.

• One school resource officer costs as much as several thousand school staff members who volunteer to take training to be armed first responders. We could defend a medium sized school district for the same cost as a single SRO.
• The Florida School Guardian program deliberately excludes almost all classroom teachers. We need to protect our students, not the parking lot or the ball field.
• There are dozens of retired military and police in every community. They would gladly serve as school protectors.

Progressive politicians and teachers unions refuse to consider these obvious solutions. This is another example of unions and politicians defending their turf while leaving our children undefended.

The political and media system brought us where we are today. As citizens and parents, we can’t sit back and expect the system to fix itself. We will have to go to the school board meetings and replace the union interests with our own. We will have to shame the media into reporting responsibly on celebrity violence. We will have to see through the self-serving motives of  politicians.

We are the best advocates our children have. We must speak up and defend them.
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Thank you to Dean Weingarten and Bill Frady for help with this article. Mistakes and omissions are mine.
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