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How to Stop School Shooting Like Uvalde

A sweeping gun bill has passed in the House this week in the wake of the horrific mass shooting scene in Uvalde, Texas. Lots of legal opinions are bound to be stirred by that legislation in the weeks to come, as seems always to be the case in the wake of yet another disturbed individual killing innocent people, destroying families, shattering communities, and of course, making law-abiding gun owners feel the heat.

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Of course the Uvalde shooting is an absolute tragedy. No one on either side of the gun legislation debate actually wants to see our American brothers and sisters in gut wrenching pain over the loss of their children to senseless violence. There’s nothing about this that’s positive or good - save for the lessons that we should be taking away from it.

This opinion piece will come in two segments. First is, of course, the agenda that most people are missing, and the second is from the perspective of governmental interference.

Before getting into this, I’ll just reiterate that there’s nothing sadder and more disparaging than witnessing children being slaughtered. The adults that went with them, too, are equally tragic, and their loss is clearly being felt across the nation.

Unfortunately, however, their loss is also being used to push a narrative that simply isn’t true. As far as I can tell, NPR was the first mass media syndicate to claim that there have been 27 school shootings so far this year. I say that they were the earliest I could find, because that claim was immediately and widely echoed around the web by individuals, indie media and of the major networks alike. It wouldn’t be so problematic if it were actually true.

But before I get into the facts, it should not go unnoticed that this is claim wasn't just conflated as I'll show evidence for below. It was also use specifically to strike fear in the hearts of parents, who will then create the momentum in their communities, and of course Washington, for change that the publication seems to want. This is slanted media at its most conniving (okay, there are probably worse examples, but it’s still pretty bad). And if I was a parent of a Uvalde student who knew this, I'd be furious that the death of my child was being used to push any agenda - even one that seems to ooze with loving, caring bystandership in mind.

'But it's NPR! Why would they lie,’ you may be asking, ‘and how can they get away with it if it's completely untrue?'

First, let me say that I love NPR. They have really innovative stories. They are reaching out to new age groups and cultures for their on-air and reporting personalities. They report international news and local news right on top of each other. Try getting that from all the other majors!

What I don't like, however, is when they join the ranks of those majors in skewing the data to push their narrative. So, let's get it straight. National Public Radio (and their various publications) pulled their data from Education Week, which is a largely reliable source that tracks school shootings. Their particular definition is "an incident in which a person other than the suspect suffers a bullet wound on school property."

As is obvious by this definition, it gives a wide berth for scuffles in the parking lot, outside of school hours, gang land shootings spilling over onto school property and most importantly, shootings that do not end in death. In fact, NPR's cited report lumps both deaths and injuries into one dataset, which is certainly their prerogative. The problem comes, however, when a major Mass Media outlet takes that dataset and uses it to conveniently misuse the gap between the two very disparate and very important data points within that dataset - banking, perhaps on the notion that if anyone ever calls them on it, they'll simply say, "Well, we trusted them to do their research, so it's too bad for the right-wingers that it conveniently benefits the rest of the article we based on it."

News blip - 3 killed, 1 injured in shooting at Maryland manufacturing facility, officials say

Even today, as I sat and wrote this story, there was a mass shooting in Maryland that claimed the lives of three and injuring another. If this was on school property, this would not fall directly under the definition that NPR is misusing it as in their referenced article.

More of the blip

In fact, if one looks further at EdWeek's data, of all the remaining 26 school shootings under this definition, there were 83 "injuries or deaths," with the vast majority of those - 56 - being injuries. This means 2/3 of NPR's referenced shootings did not result in deaths. The data goes further to indicate that the vast majority of school shootings end in one or zero deaths.

Technically, the tragedy at Uvalde overlaps EdWeek's definition. But that incident is more correctly defined as a school mass shooting. And of mass school shootings in the U.S., there have only been 13 since 1966. This definition comes from the scientists at Scientific American for their May 25 article in the publication of the same nomenclature.

Robby Soave put it quite succinctly in his June 26 article when he said, "Obviously, 13 incidents in the last 56 years is a very different statistic than 27 incidents in the last few months." Nevertheless, that didn't stop the misrepresentation of the figures.

What probably drives the greatest chasm between the reality of gun violence data and liberal media's interest in using the horror of mass shootings to drive an intimate message of ridding America of its guns, can be found in a Pew Research Institute article.

Clearly there is an issue with gun violence in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than any other year on record. Remembering that this figure doesn't specifically rule out how trends in gun deaths have changed over time, in 2020, 54% of all gun-related deaths in this country - more than all other gun deaths combined - were either adjudicated or declared suicides.

Regardless what the numbers say or which side of the political divide they most benefit, no sustainable solution has ever conclusively been tied to more government intervention. In fact, it's just the opposite - though NPR might have their own stock of resources they might deploy to dance around the rhetoric.

This leads me to the second part of this story.

My opinion is the same now as it always has been. Outside of a national or international war, there are no localized problems that individual states can’t fix themselves. And that’s where we need to be focusing our efforts. History has shown that the minute we invite the government in to solve our problems for us, they pounce on the opportunity to, themselves, benefit.

Federalism, the belief that more governmental power is better for the people, is arguably why we spend more of our annual GDP budget on the American Military-Industrial Complex (currently $778B - up nearly 5% from this time last year) than the next nine nations combined. My belief is that this is lazy self-governance. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution was specifically added to reserve all decisions not ruled upon by the government to be the providence of the states - in effect the popular vote of the community-majority. There are still problems with this, as we are seeing in the recent resurfacing of then-as-now-controversial 1973 Supreme Court ruling over Roe v. Wade. But I still prefer this manifest direction, which will always espouse Popular Sovereignty - the concept that the government is only given power by and through the people - over any move or act to bring more steel to any hammer the government already uses to pummel our states and communities with legislation designed as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Bringing it back to the Uvalde conversation, lots of folks have chimed in on the issue, including Mathew McConaughey, who spoke at the White House on Tuesday, and delivered a very passionate speech about those who lost their lives in the massacre. He also called for what he labeled “responsible gun ownership.”

On this note, he and I are in complete agreement. In fact, as a staunch supporter of the Constitution and all it’s Amendments - and most especially those that protect us against our ever-encroaching government - I feel that I have a solution for this conundrum of lawless abuse of weaponry in our country. And, yes, I said abuse of weaponry there. Our gun ownership was supposed to shield us from harm, and keep our leaders in check - not to shoot school children, church-goers, shoppers at local grocery stores, travelers on a subway, or concert-goers in Las Vegas. And I’m hoping that I’ve kept everyone’s attention as I announced that all cultures and backgrounds are both affected by, and affect this issue of weapon abuse in this country.

What’s my answer? I hate to say it’s more guns. But in effect, it kind of is. Or, at least it is more gun owners who are trained and stand guard in their communities. That’s what we need.

What does this look like? Well, every community has fathers - many of whom are vets, and yet even more of whom love their kids. I’m willing to bet that these fathers would stand and be counted as the first to take their children’s safety - not to mention the safety of their neighbors children - as a very personal honor.

Have we lost that in this country? Honor? I don’t think so. I think it’s taken a backseat to fear mongering and a drop in national trust. But I also don’t think that either of those factors are too firmly stitched into our culture to be undone. I think that honor and local pride have been overshadowed. But just because they live in a shadow, does not mean their not alive and well. And for those of us who’ve been in the military, we know full well that when you offer someone responsibility, they realize that you’ve also offered them your trust. And they innately and automatically take that very seriously.

For those who’ve never served in the military, it’s a lot like taking a troubled student and putting them in charge of the group. Counterintuitively, they become less troubled. They start to feel a sense of personal pride in their new role. They ultimately become leaders.

But leaders are not the only things we need. We need people who are proud to stand their post and safeguard our schools and places of meditation, community centers and so on. We need people willing to take that a step further and be trained, to maintain that training, and to be willing to work with a team, to volunteer their time, to engaged in their communities and prove themselves trustworthy to guard our most precious resource. And, yes, to carry guns in the service of protecting our most precious resource.

Strange, you say? More guns, you ask? How can we fight a problem by inserting more of the problem, you ask?

Well, the old adage, fight fire with fire, brings with it a literal ring in its terminology. I’m hoping you’re picking up the gun puns there. But before I get into it, I should say that it’s not a catch-all. It will not solve all of our mass shooting scenarios, and more should still be done to keep guns out of the hands that would do us harm.

In any case, have we really tried all we can try? Desperate times, as the left might argue, require desperate measures. Besides, where would you rather your sons, brothers and fathers be carrying weapons and training to combat threats to Americans? Overseas where they’re likely to die protecting Uncle Sam’s oil reserves against people who don’t want us in their country? Or here, protecting living, breathing resources like their brothers and sisters, their children and parents?

So, how does it work?

Well, it goes like this: For schools alone - and I’m not talking about colleges and universities, but primary and secondary schools - we need to enlist the volunteer assistance of all available and willing fathers of school children (as a start) to attend active shooter response training, to maintain regular training sessions (at least bi-annually), pass background and psychological checks, and to be equipped with appropriate body armor and communications devices that will both keep them as safe as possible and also in constant communication with school officials and local law enforcement.

These fathers - and I’m just going to call them community members from here on out - will not only have skin in the game because their children attend the school. They will also create a direct link between the schools and their attending families. This will will not only strengthen communication and ties with the schools and other parents throughout the community, but also with local law enforcement as well.

Does this sound crazy? Yes? Well, what else sounds crazy? Doing nothing? Asking our government, which clearly does not care about us, to reach in even further into our communities when we have everything we need to solve all of our own problems ourselves? That’s what I think is crazy.

Think about it: when was the last time our government passed any legislation that was actually good for the American people, and not just for its own interests? Our government bails out its cronies in wall street while there are people starving in the streets. They give billions to other countries to fight wars that are not ours to fight, while college students are crippled under debt for a degree that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The Senate has habitually given itself endless terms, endless raises and endless insurance coverage, while teachers, whose salaries nationwide reflect the abysmal education our nations students are receiving, have to work second jobs to pay their mortgage. And don’t even get me started on the recent uncovering of recent government collusion in social media censorship and mass media fear mongering.

The point is, we need to realize that our government has turned its back on us, and we need to start relying on ourselves. This is how the states were originally formed - with their own sense of freedoms and their own agency to do what they need to do to fix their own individual problems. The founding fathers knew that catch-all legislation was not a sensible, sustainable solution for every community in a free economy.

And that’s still true today. What works to eliminate violent crimes in New York City will not work in Louisville, Kentucky. And what works in Kentucky will not work in Oklahoma City.

So, instead of draping another cape around Uncle Sam’s boney shoulders, America’s communities need to be given the resources to deal with their own problems in ways that best serve those communities’. And I think that if we entrust local safety to local fathers who love their families and their communities, we will have more eyes to watch for problem areas, we’ll take a lot of strain off local law enforcement who are already caught in a very strange and demanding time in our nation’s history. And we will finally get back to having open-door policies in our neighborhoods and our schools and our communities.

If you think this idea is radical, I’d say I agree. But what would you rather see happen - a father who’s been professionally trained as a response-ready sentry at your school? Or would you rather pretend that guns don’t exist, and that the government’s catch-all plan to penalize responsible gun owners alongside criminals who would get guns no matter what the cost? Because no matter what way you want to see this situation we’re in in this country, you will see guns in schools. The only choice that makes sense is to make sure that we, the community members, are the ones carrying those guns. We should also ensure that we are better trained, better armed, and always ready to deal with a threat that is clearly not going away when our government is not obligating itself to protect us.

They’ll send opioids into our communities and rake in billions. They’ll send unmarked rental vans with unidentified, heavily armed DHS officers to remove bystanders to riots rather than simply seeking community-based solutions. They’ll do all kinds of things that protect their billionaire cronies. But they will not protect us.

It is up to us, my friends, to protect ourselves. That is the only way that we can truly say that we are protected. Is my plan flawless? No. Will there be problems if it’s ever implemented? Yes, absolutely. But this is something that America’s communities can do literally tomorrow that will effect change - real change, that promotes real results, while strengthening our communities.

And with that, I’ll end my rant.

Thanks for reading.

Be sure to follow the author on Twitter & Instagram - @cyleodonnell

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