There have been many suggestions as to how to prevent a tragedy like the Parkland massacre from occurring again. Many are not only foolish, but seem to have only an ideological theme for an answer. Arming teachers is one suggestion. I personally would not feel comfortable trusting that an educator would have the ability to make the split second decision required as to when and how to use a firearm, but worse, to accidentally shoot the wrong person. Not only that, but what if the teacher failed to act as needed, or froze in the moment? The whole country would place blame on that individual for the outcome.
One cannot expect to guarantee to prevent any future tragedy by banning firearms, forced registration, or stiffening the existing laws. The F.B.I. is mainly to blame for this one. The agency has virtually unlimited resources funded by the American taxpayer. This kid, Nikolas Cruz, was on their radar, and they simply chose to not use those resources to follow-up the leads. If they had fired Strzok, Mccabe, and Page instead of reassigning them, the F.B.I. could afford to hire a half a dozen low-level agents in their place, to investigate this, and some of the other “low priority” leads that come in, like the San Bernardino shooter, and the Las Vegas one as well. The F.B.I. admittedly had prior leads regarding these tragedies, but considered them not worthy of spending our money to investigate them further. The excuse was they didn’t feel there was enough to make charges stick, given the information they had. Well guess what, that’s why you investigate things further, so that you acquire the information needed to determine if charges are justified.
Furthermore, local law enforcement failed to properly investigate this maniac, even after being called to the residence three dozen times. There was an officer at the school, but I guess the Parkland school budget didn’t have enough funding to have more than one police officer cover the enormous campus of three thousand students. The officer did nothing wrong. In an armed suspect situation, rule # 1 is there must be two officers to properly approach. One officer approaches, while the other covers and they rotate positions during the approach.
There is a lot of chatter about gun control, but before we can allow the federal government to take away our right to keep and bear arms, they must first demonstrate that they can adequately protect us without having those rights. Obviously the government has a long way to go in convincing Americans that it has that ability. These continued blatant failures at all levels of government are in essence the responsible entities in the Parkland and a whole host of other tragedies. Rather than improving their efficiency, they just continue to increase their budgets, and try to convince the public that we are the ones that need to be more vigilant.
This may not totally prevent another tragedy, but I think Congress could easily pass a law that simply states: Any facility whether public or private must either employ armed private security, adequate for its geographic size and location, or if the facility is a publicly funded one, it must have on premises, prior to opening the doors, a minimum of two law enforcement officers present. Instead of arming the teachers, the teachers would carry some sort of pager that immediately alerts the officers of the location of any given threat. I believe that the presence of two or more squad cars would be somewhat of a deterrent by itself.
We have law enforcement officers to protect our money, automobile safety, and welfare for the homeless. Why is it so difficult to perceive that they be assigned to protect our children? Most educators’ salaries are far higher than what police officers are paid. There is no reason that any public school should not have funding in their budget for adequate full-time police presence at every school in America! With the price of tuition at these private schools, there is no excuse for lax security there either!
Instead of government asking of us to give up or modify our second amendment rights, we need to require more from our government. After all they are supposed to be working for us, not the other way around. “…The right to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” so that the people have the ability to defend themselves, from a government that would oppress them.
It seems that people think that the second amendment has something to do with hunting. It doesn’t. It has everything to do with exactly what Liberals want; to first disarm, then oppress the people. The possession of these assault type weapons is simply an attempt by the people, to maintain some balance of power between ‘the people’ and a government that becomes too oppressive. This government of ours has grown to such an overblown bureaucracy that it has lost sight of its purpose, “A government by the people for the people”.