In the aftermath of yet another mass murder in an American school, the National Rifle Association and their apologists are out in full force with explanations of why such gun violence continues to happen in the United States—and only in the United States.
According to international arms smuggler Oliver North, the soon-to-be NRA president, the problem is television ... and Ritalin.
And they've come through a culture where violence is commonplace. All we need to do is turn on the TV, go to a movie. If you look at what has happened to young people, many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten. Now I am certainly not a doctor, I'm a [traitor], but I can see those kinds of things happening and endangering those two gals and their siblings.
According to NRA shouting parrot Dana Loesch, the problem is the media.
"[The media] has got to stop creating more of these monsters by oversaturation," Loesch said on NRATV.
According to Fox News talking head Howard Safir, the problem is "Common Core".
Something that I don’t think anybody has mentioned and it’s probably not going to be popular, but we have to look at this Common Core curriculum, which takes emotionally disturbed kids and learning disabled kids and mainstream them in to the general population of students where they really don't get the kind of attention they need.
According to Fox News talking head and ex-House Republican Jason Chaffetz, the problem is politically correct culture.
But there's something really wrong with this person, whatever that they did. And so, mental health and communities, I think they do need help and support in trying to figure out best practices, what can they do, how do we diagnose this person and how do we deal with it, because there's this politically correct culture, particularly for people that are less than 18 years old, to say, well, let's just keep them going in the system instead of actually dealing with it.
According to the idiot Lt. Governor of the state, the answer is to militarize the teachers.
You know, it talks about a well-run militia – the 2nd Amendment – our teachers are part of that well-run militia, by the way.
And that there are too many doors.
Had there been one single entrance possibly for every student, maybe he would have been stopped.
It was Sean Hannity, however, who provided the last piece of what appears to be emerging as the dominant conservative plan. The answer is to do what China does, or at least what China aspires to do. The answer is constant vigilance. We must assemble government-backed teams to monitor the public interactions of every child in every school and report on the suspicious ones.
It's not a gun issue. Every time it happens, the worse -- it's always a different gun. So that's not the issue here. The issue here -- well, there is some issues with gun safety, you can't let mentally ill people have guns. Criminals don't obey the laws by their very nature. We also have to have, every school district needs to have some person that monitor's every kid's social media postings, maybe they need two people. This is a reality now that they're telegraphing what they're going to do. Terrorists do it. These school shooters do it.
But not all of the murders are current students, or ever were: Who monitors the ex-students, or the immediate families of both students and their teachers? The monitoring staff will have to be far larger, to keep a watchful eye on that extended group. And it is not just elementary schools, or high schools, but universities as well. And not just those, but churches. And nightclubs. And fast food restaurants. And hotel patrons.
If we limit it just to our public schools, though, we have a good idea what the libertarian plan would look like. The ideal solution, the only answer to protecting our citizens' freedoms, is a police state. The schools would have only one entrance and exit, and be patrolled by armed guards. The instructors themselves would be armed. We would limit the students’ access to media, whether it be news reports of other murders or violent entertainment programs. We would either curtail their use of medication or transfer those that use it into different facilities; the "emotionally disturbed" and "learning disabled", in particular, would be separated so as to not come into contact with their better adjusted peers.
And in a back room, staff would monitor every student's public interactions. Quietly, but efficiently. There would be individuals dedicated to the task.
We would do all of this, and all of this is currently being proposed, rather than limit access to guns. The guns are sacrosanct; if every other freedom, Constitutional or otherwise, must be sacrificed instead, then so be it. If our schools become hardened fortresses, so that students can only be murdered on their way in or on their way out, so be it. If we must isolate the emotionally disturbed or learning disabled, so be it.
It is either that or limit access to guns, as is done in every other developed nation on the planet, and the libertarian-minded solution would never tolerate such a breach of our freedoms as that. We need our guns, after all. It is our guns that will save us if a tyrannical government ever attempted to turn our beloved nation into a police state.
