So let’s address the elephant in the room which is the school shooting in Florida earlier this week. Of course, immediately after the shooting all of the gun-control crowd and the left wing nut jobs began putting up their memes with clever sayings about gun control or Republicans voting to kill kids or what have you. Of course, none of it is accurate or true and none of it actually identifies or addresses the underlying problems that led to this tragic event. Because of what happened related to a couple of Facebook posts I put up earlier this week, I have to tell you liberals right up front that I am in no way shape or form minimizing this tragedy or saying that it could not have been prevented. But if we are going to try and prevent these incidents in the future we have to have discussions that might offend some of you snowflakes.

There are laws in place and the famous ad campaign, “if you see something, say something” that could have prevented this specific tragedy. We know that Nikolas Cruz had been reported to the FBI last year after posting on a YouTube page that he was going to be a professional school shooter. The FBI claims that they could not identify Nikolas Cruz, asking us to believe that they could not have followed his IP address or found him on Instagram under that very same name and seen similar posts from him. They want us to believe that they could not have found his Facebook page which contain similar statements. I think we need to cut them some slack because it is hard to follow up on a single would be mass murderer when most of your efforts and focus are on promoting an illegal coup to remove the President of the United States.

Of course all of the stories started appearing about this being the 18th school shooting since January 1 of this year, giving you the impression that in less than 6 weeks 18 different groups of students have been attacked. When you read the actual news stories, you realize that there have not been 18 school shootings in the way you and I would define those. CNN, ABC, the New York Times, and the New York Post were the stories that I read but they were carried everywhere. In all of those articles, with the exception of the Post, you had to read very deep and the article to realize that they were misleading you.

Out of the 18 alleged school shootings claimed to have occurred this year, 12 would not have met any reasonable person’ definition of school shooting. Included in the list was a 32-year-old man committing suicide in his car while he was parked in a former school parking lot. The school had actually been closed. Another example included the death of a teenager who had been involved in a fight with a classmate and was shot during a subsequent confrontation, also in the school parking lot. After a football game at a local high school, two men from the rival schools got in a fight in which a gun was pulled and one of them was shot. A teenager committed suicide on school grounds. A third grader, during a show and tell at her school, was handed a gun by a police officer and she pulled the trigger. The gun was supposed to be unloaded, fortunately no one was hurt. I could go on but you get the gist of the point, that being these are not what you and I or any reasonable person would call mass school shootings.

Guns do not kill people. People who do not value human life kill people. Our society has quit teaching respect for others, quit disciplining children in school, made excuses for children who misbehave as justification for not disciplining them, and we have taught them to hate people with whom they disagree. We have forgotten, or maybe we have ignored, the fact that children do not have experience and in many cases have not yet developed coping skills that would allow them to be truly tolerant of people that are different from them. They see and hear in the classroom and in the media adults threatening our president, Christians, conservatives, or others with whom those people might disagree. The rhetoric is hateful and all too often violent, and we are surprised when our children react in the same way?

You may not like guns, that is your right. You may not believe in God, that is also your right. But if someone breaks into your home and threatens you and your family, you are going to call someone who can help and pray that they get there in time.

We cannot prevent all of these types of tragedies. We have laws on the books and systems in place that can prevent a vast majority of these shootings, if the people in charge pay attention and do their job. Too often however, when someone does say something, parents or guardians call those people racist or bigoted or complain that their child is being picked on. More laws or more government intervention are not the answer. In the short-term, allowing teachers or security personnel to carry firearms can not only deter such attacks, but can also save lives once such an attack begins. We saw the football coach put himself between the shooter and his students, if he had had a gun he very likely would have stopped the shooting right then and there.

In the long term, we have to go back to educating our children the way most of us were educated. We were taught to respect others including our teachers and the administration, even if we did not personally like them. When we got out of line, we were disciplined and mom and dad supported that disciplinary action which nine times out of 10 was justified and appropriated. The guns are not the problem, society’s attitude towards raising our children and how we interact with each other are the real problems. I grew up in a time when pickup trucks had gun racks and those gun racks were full. Those trucks were parked in the school parking lot every day, and I never saw one of them used in anger. I think that’s a lesson we learned a long time ago and some of those in charge now need to learn from history.