In 1990 a law was passed making it illegal for the adults in a school to protect the children, the Gun Free School Zones Act. It should surprise no one that we then began to see the occasional school shooting. The United States is a very large country, so one would expect there to be persons willing to mass slaughter students just for the notoriety, not to mention the emotional problems emanating from the drugs the shooters are on. I don't think there have been any that were not on drugs, and now we have the phenomenon of the trans shooters. Why on Earth was this law not rescinded when it turned out to be such a disaster? It's almost like the politicians don't want them to stop.
The best way to avoid a mass shooting, and violence in general, is to avoid living or working in a blue area. I remember that, at the time of the Bush/Gore election in 2000 the average murder rate in the counties that voted for Gore was 13.2 per 100,000 per year, and the average rate in the counties that voted for Bush was 2.1 per 100,000 per year, much of it the rural urban divide. (Good luck finding that info now.)
Unbeknownst to some is that mass shootings frequently happen in gun free zones, but it almost seems like a closely held secret. That being the case one would think that our progressive leaders in the blue regions of the U.S., claiming to exhibit herculean concern for the safety of their citizens, would be working as hard as possible to eliminate them.
Economist John Lott is the director of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and the author of More Guns, Less Crime, his book explaining the realities of crime versus gun control. The website for the Crime Prevention Research Center is at the link below.
https://crimeresearch.org/
And an article on Dr, Lott from the left leaning Wikipedia is at the link below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott
You will find that Dr. Lott is attacked in the left wing media; they will claim that his methods are flawed, and on and on. So much comes down to who you believe. Many critics are fearful, so they want gun control, but they don't realize that it is a false safety.
One thing that Dr. Lott has found is that the United States does not have an unusually high rate of mass shootings compared to the rest of the world, though all left wing politicians claim that it does.
"He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security." ~ Benjamin Franklin
In the article linked below John Lott explains that the data on mass shootings and the stopping thereof by armed civilians is grossly misrepresented.
https://thefederalist.com/2024/09/04/cdc-fbi-working-to-hide-data-showing-shootings-stopped-by-good-guys-with-guns/
The above chart is from the article linked below, from John Lott's Crime Research organization.
How about a really cynical point of view? School shootings; Pass a law legally prohibiting the adults in a school from protecting the children, wait for the occasional nut case, blame Republicans and guns, never mention said law or how the shooters are on psycho-active drugs, rinse and repeat. Frequently talk about school shootings on the news so the nut cases never forget. (After all, people will not willingly get in the boxcars.)
If this seems a bit over the top, stop and think. The federal Gun Free School Zones act was passed in 1990, does anyone remember school shootings before that? Such things were almost but not quite nonexistent. Think of it as a law prohibiting the fighting of evil. There has been a great effort to promote the idea that defending against evil is itself evil.
https://drp314.substack.com/p/the-demonizing-of-self-defense
Above we see Kyle Rittenhouse fighting for his life when three people tried to kill him. Only by being armed did he survive, and even then most people would not have lived in that situation. The way the story was presented by the media was disgraceful; a real blame the victim recasting with twisted facts and half truths. Propaganda at it's finest.
https://drp314.substack.com/p/propaganda-thoughts
The five rules of propaganda:
The rule of simplification - reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
The rule of disfiguration - discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
The rule of transfusion - manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
The rule of unanimity - presenting one's viewpoint as if it were unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: draining the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure , and by 'psychological contagion'.
The rule of orchestration - endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
I think that most who voted for the Gun Free School Zones Act simply saw it as what they needed to vote for so as to appear to be voting for children’s safety, but why was it kept when it turned into a disaster? After the shootings started why was the law not rescinded? The wikipedia article herein linked is interesting, about shootings with four or more deaths only:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." ~ Benjamin Franklin
Wikipedia must always be taken with a grain of salt; the segment on the Austin Texas shooting at the University of Texas does not mention that Whitman was found to have a brain tumor, nor does it tell of the local civilians who used their rifles to help the police.
Some of us remember that, on the same day as the Newtown event a man in China stabbed over twenty school children. Why is that better than being shot?
The issue would seem to be that of the attempt to remove all power from the people in the name of safety. If you could in fact remove all firearms from civilian hands, somehow taking them from criminals, you would simply get knife and sword sword attacks. So why not sword control? Then knife control. Then blunt, heavy object control. Then just control. It's turtles all the way down.
The real issue is one of the response to evil. Evil cannot be reasoned with, it can only be fought. The law requiring that schools be free of weapons is one that says, in effect, we decide that we will not fight evil since we are too good for that, or is it simply a power grab?
Why do I talk so much about guns in my essays? Because it's the only real defense the people have. Between one and three hundred million people were killed by their own governments in the twentieth century, let's help our friends to get a clue. (According to the University of Hawaii Democide Project it was 262 million.) The summer of 2020 should show us that.
https://drp314.substack.com/p/democide
https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/MURDER.HTM
Stay Brave, Stay Free
Great article.
“Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible." - Kamala Harris
Kinda tells you where we are at in America
For a much more cynical view, in light of all we are now living through, I would not put it past some of the people who passed this law to have planned that it would mean less security for our children, more mass shootings and casualties, in an atttempt to require law abiding gun owners to surrender their guns. Worked in Australia.