What School Shooters Have in Common

It's the schools.

AI was asked to produce “a young man with a rifle” and it came out much like school shooter selfies. Hmmm.

There’s been another school shooting. This one killed four people and injured thirty more, apparently committed by a 14 year-old student at the school in northern Georgia. Luckily, I know the answer to this problem.

Get rid of all guns.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Just kidding! We not only have the Second Amendment, there are some 300 million guns in this country, and guns don’t go out of date. A .30-40 Krag someone’s great-grandpa used in the Spanish-American War is still plenty deadly.

No, that wasn’t serious. What I really see as the way to end all school shootings is this: get rid of all schools.

And that’s not a joke. By “all schools” I mean public schools, the kind run by governments that overtax you and give money to totally incompetent people who have teachers’ unions to protect them. We should all be aware by now that kids learn very little in these schools, and what little they learn is likely to be wrong. Thanks to the taxing power of school districts the schools and resulting “education” are hugely expensive and ineffective.

The reasons for school shootings are manifold, but one big one is that students are forced to go to the school in their area. By high school, the districts are larger and there are often thousands of students who have to be there. They are legally required to go to that specific school. The term “sitting duck” was almost invented for them.

Out of those thousands of students, there is bound to be at least one who is unhappy and considers himself treated badly. He (always a he) also is likely to be on one or more psychotropic drugs, uses marijuana and plays first-person shooter video games. Since he is also forced to attend that particular school, his anger and resentment can build up over time at the other students he thinks are mistreating him (or are actually mistreating him). All he has to do to get revenge on people he thinks hate him is to bring a gun to school and start pulling the trigger.

School vouchers would solve this problem. Students could go to schools they chose, improving their attitudes. The schools would be smaller, which lowers the chances of bullying and also the chances that any given student will be dangerous. And most important, the school wouldn’t have to keep the student.

Public schools are required to keep troublemakers as students. Oh, nothing says that specifically, it’s just in phrases like this from the Iowa State Constitution: “The Board of Education shall provide for the education of all the youths of the State, through a system of Common Schools and such school shall be organized and kept in each school district at least three months in each year.” “All the youths” requires the state to deal with everyone—smart, dumb, delinquent, drugged. Private schools, even those that accepted state vouchers, wouldn’t be bound by the same rules. Students would meet their demands or find another school.

“But some kids would get a poor education,” a good liberal might say, “or perhaps no education at all.” You mean, as opposed to the sterling educations they get today? Universal vouchers would end the bureaucratic need to build huge school empires backed by multi-billion dollar bond issues. The object is not to have  big schools sitting on sixty acres of untaxed land—the object is just to give kids an education. Since universal education was thought up 140 years ago, we’ve lost sight of the actual purpose.

*********

And of course, this school shooting once again showed the uselessness of government in stopping these crimes. Within hours of the Georgia massacre, reports started coming in that the shooter had previously made threats against the school, they were reported to state officers and the FBI and nobody did anything about it. They might as well have given the kid an all-access shooter’s hall pass.

This is not even a little bit isolated. In the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida in 2018, an officer whose job it was to protect students stood outside while the shooting occurred. There’s video of him. In Uvalde, the same thing happened, with officers standing around for almost an hour until he whole thing was over, also on video. My favorite was the cop who used the sanitizer dispenser while they waited—wouldn’t want to catch cold!

Nor do the FBI and local cops do anything about the problem kids. Concerned parents called the FBI over the Florida shooter, Nikolas Cruz—they did nothing. The Sandy Hook, Connecticut shooter had given plenty of evidence he was unstable—nada. The Uvalde shooter, Salvador Ramos, was even nicknamed “school shooter” by fellow students. In every case, the shooters attacked a school they currently or previously attended.

So, governments establish these huge schools with thousands of students and require the kids to go to that specific school every day. Students who show evidence they may become violent are required to continue going to the school, likely because schools are paid per student per day and also because parents of troubled kids don’t want to seem like bad parents, so they oppose transfers to alternative schools.

Then government taxes citizens to pay for school cops (oops, “resource officers”) and local police and the FBI and they do little to nothing even when warned. Then when the mass shootings occur, the first reaction is to get rid of guns—one of the things to which we have a constitutional right.

As I noted, there are 300 million guns in America, as opposed to 31,000 public junior high and high schools. And we know where all the schools are.