Mass murders inside American schools have become so common that right-to-murder advocates no longer need to distribute talking points for each one. Fox News and the Republican politicos immediately called up to explain why it was important for each murderer to have access to their chosen weapons can simply crib from whatever they said last time, and nobody makes much of an effort to tailor their little performances to the actual facts of the newest murder.
You know what they're going to say before they say it, and so do they.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says "We have to harden these targets." The problem is not nationwide access to weapons of war—the problem is that we are not "hardening" our elementary schools to appropriate wartime standards.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has remained indicted for seven long years on corruption charges and showed up for his Fox News interview about the dead elementary schoolers wearing his Ken Paxton campaign t-shirt, again suggests arming elementary school teachers. The problem is not that every aspirational mass murderer has easy access to weapons and body armor capable of holding off professional law enforcement officers; the problem is that the amateurs were not able to immediately open fire themselves when the mass murderer made it past the rest of the school's security.
Sean Hannity's coverage—and the usual Fox procedure of having their Republican-campaign-backing pundit hosts "cover" breaking news events rather than leaving it to the network's supposed professional journalists quickly showed the network's intentions before anyone even opened their mouths—featured an important-sounding pundit offering up "something we discussed in the past, back in 2018."
"Man traps," he says. Schools need "a series of interlocking doors" that are "triggered by a tripwire," thus trapping the mass murderer "like a rat."
While Pat Brosnan's resume insists he is a retired New York police detective who now, conveniently enough, runs a consulting business devoted to providing security solutions, it is more likely that he is an extraterrestrial who has never before visited an American school. American schools are spread-out affairs, with long fenced perimeters and entrances built to accommodate daily access by hundreds of small children, their parents, school staff, and others. Installing a series of "tripwires" and "interlocking doors" might be practical in some small subset of schools, presuming we are again willing to overlook the trauma of young children inevitably being caught in the "man traps" meant to keep their childhood lives as free of murder as is possible, in a hardened building in a war zone, but most schools would have to be demolished and rebuilt to these new "hardened" standards.
We should probably prove ourselves willing to provide every school with sufficient textbooks for every student before we go off making grand plans to rebuild schools according to Jigsaw standards.
But Brosnan mentioned 2018 very specifically. Is all of this sounding familiar yet?
Ah yes, there we go. Four years and one week after Texas politicians and Fox News hosts took to the airwaves to give their proposals for what ought to be done about a horrific mass murder inside a Texas school, the same politicians and hosts simply cribbed from their previous coverage to provide ... a rerun. A rerun that again ignored the specific shooting they were supposed to be responding to, offering up the same pablum and fake solutions.
Why do we know each of these mass-murder advocates is offering fake solutions they don't intend to ever even act on? Because we’ve already had this discussion many times. They've already offered these solutions many times. And then the cameras shut off and the schools are not "hardened" because no mass-murder advocate is willing to raise taxes to the extent that would be necessary to "harden" them, and teachers remain unarmed because the mass murder advocates never had any intention of paying for a statewide program training and equipping every school teacher for their own role in the performative little dance, and the "tripwires" usually consist of a handful of doors that can be remotely locked while the rest of the school remains as accessible as it always was because, again, nobody gives a flying damn about schools so long as the football fields remain watered and the parents have a place to get drunk and shout things on Friday nights.
Have you seen the state of American schools? Sean Hannity, Dan Patrick, and the still-indicted Ken Paxton have never given a single damn about any of them except as talking points.
Mass murder advocates have been having an absolute fit over the idea that schools might tell children to keep masks on during a pandemic, and are currently engaged in a nationwide propaganda campaign to convince Fox News viewers that the teachers who are angry about murders in classrooms and about the indifference of schools and parents to basic pandemic security measures are, Actually, all pedophiles and child-groomers.
For four years those that advocate for the rights of mass murderers to murder children when "necessary" have spewed the same would-be solutions; for four years the murders have continued unimpeded, to the point that the talking points of four or ten or even twenty years ago can be used unaltered. Fox News could simply pop in the old tapes and the only way for anyone to tell which mass murder was which would be which president is being threatened with retaliation if they dare lift a finger to stop them.
So where's the "hardening," Republican-dominated states that have had two decades to "harden" things? Why aren't elementary school teachers leaning over first-grade desks with leaded weapons dangling from their waists, prepared at any moment to fire on anyone who comes through the classroom door? Why have the "man traps" not foiled the gunmen looking to murder whole classrooms of children?
It's all bullshit. Ken Paxton, Dan Patrick, Greg Abbott—all of the advocates for the rights of mass murderers have bragged over and over and over about their willingness to provide more guns to murderers with fewer restrictions on who can get them.
Not one of them is holding up a rebel flag while screaming that they don't care what the federal government thinks, they're going to "harden" their schools whether Washington likes it or not.
They're fucking liars, and it never happens. Their sole concern is advocating for the rights of American mass murderers to obtain whatever weapons they want, to purchase body armor capable of deflecting the bullets of armed police and guards and teachers, and to walk to the scenes of their planned murders in all this gear with all these weapons without being accosted by police until they pull the trigger—because walking around prepared to commit mass murder is, to Greg Abbott and others, the only "freedom" worth protecting.
They're all fucking liars, a good chunk of them are supporters of an attempted rebellion against the United States, and we should stop listening to people who have spent their lives inventing "good" reasons why Americans ought to be allowed to murder each other so easily and quickly that even our now-militarized police departments cannot stand in their way.
