So Much for the “Thin Blue Line:” Of School Shootings and Gun Control – A Rant

So Much for the “Thin Blue Line”

Of School Shootings and Gun Control

Disclaimer: The views an opinions expressed herein are my own.

On May 24th, around 11:33 A.M., a gunman entered an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Police entered the school two minutes later. While students were trapped in the classroom, frantically calling for help whilst at the mercy of gunman Salvador Ramos, a force of nineteen police officered dawdled in the hallway. A Border Patrol tactical unit arrived a little after noon, but were blocked by local police from entering the classroom for a further hour. There have also been reports of a frankly cowardly police force handcuffing and detaining parents who expressed a desire to enter the school to retrieve their children. Images and video of the scene outside of the school, depicting a very sizable throng of heavily armed and armored men standing idly, have not helped to improve the unflattering image of the police response to the incident. Video shows parents desperately conspiring to push past the cops and enter the school themselves whilst men with badges, armor, and what appear to be automatic weapons loom in the background effectively acting as state-sanctioned bouncers for a murderer. 

Always gleeful to build a hail Mary reelection campaign on the fresh corpses of dead children, the reactions from the Democrat Party, and the left more broadly, have been completely expected. Rather than pay attention to the failure of the so-called “civil servants” whose job it ostensibly is to “protect and serve” the citizenry, they would rather we shower our ire on the second amendment. The left swiftly fell back on their go to platitudes about the need to bring back the “assault weapons” ban. Of course, the ban on so-called assault weapons did not slow the frequency of school shootings. During the ten year period when the ban was in place – August 25, 1994 to September 13, 2004 – sixty-four school shooting incidents occurred in the United States, including the now infamous Columbine shooting. Of the ten deadliest incidents that have occurred in the ensuing years since Columbine, seven of them have not involved a so-called “assault weapon.” Renewed have also been the calls for what are known as “red flag laws.” Laws that allow police to seize a person’s firearms based on a simple accusation and a rubber stamp from a judge, such laws flagrant test the limits of the fourth and fifth amendments. A few tired, and provably false, old canards have also been given renewed life as they spew from the gibbering maw of our president. Among them the fanciful and false notion that the second amendment protects the rights of hunters and, my personal favourite, the idea that the second amendment “never allowed the ownership of cannons.” This, of course, comes at a time when our government is falling all over itself to send a never-ending stream of scary black rifles to a certain eastern European nation so that they may then dispersed to the citizenry. The American government, disarming Americans and arming Ukrainians. That could be a rant unto itself, however. You could, in 1791, own a cannon. In fact, it was entirely possible to own your own warship, provided you had the funds to procure the ship and outfit it with cannons. Many such ships, owned and outfitted by private concerns, fought in the American Revolution as well as the War of 1812. In fact, you can still own a cannon in the present day. 

Looking at the shrieking coalition of red roses, hammers and sickles, and progressives (or “shitlibs” as the former two factions call them when they are pretending to disagree on some minor detail) tacitly calling for the unilateral disarmament of the citizenry whilst ignoring the failure of the agents of the state to carry out their alleged duty drives home a point that I have made in private discussions many times over since the Parkland shooting (another law enforcement failure) and the unraveling of the Black Lives Matter grift. That is that if one were to make a Venn diagram of the “ACAB,” defund the police, and “only cops should have scary black guns” crowds, it would be a perfect, singular circle. What this country has seen in Uvalde, Texas should drive home the importance of the right to keep and bear arms. One’s life can not be left in the hands of the agents of a state that is at turns increasingly incompetent and increasingly hostile.

Furthermore, federal courts have ruled that the police have no duty to protect a civilian. In fact, hot on the heels of Parkland in 2018, a group of students filed a lawsuit against the Broward school district and Broward County Sheriff’s Office, as well as other defendants. A federal judge in that case ruled that government agencies “had no constitutional duty to protect students who were not in custody.” Courts have also rejected the idea that students in class constitute being “in custody.” Rather custody is confined only to situations wherein a person loses his or her freedom, such as prison or jail. This is a rather verbose way of saying that the police essentially do not exist to protect law-abiding citizens, but to protect criminals. This is why, ultimately, the proper target of ire in the wake of Uvalde – the local police – will suffer no consequences for their perceived flagrant abnegation of their perceived duty. The state has ruled that the state has no responsibility to protect a citizen. Instead, the state will seek to punish the citizen through yet another attempted plan of disarmament. Voices calling for the citizen to be disarmed and have his protection left at the complete mercy of the agents of the state should, and must always, be rejected. 

To end this on a slightly more positive note, I am including a link to this article from Reason on the subject of the frequency and lethality of school shootings. It contains some rather interesting links that are worthy of a perusal. Just an interesting alternative perspective apart from the recurring narrative that massacres on the level of Uvalde, Stoneman Douglas High, Columbine, and Virginia tech happen all the time and that all school children are effectively dead men walking.