The Right Path to School Safety

 

The dust has largely settled from the massacre in Uvalde, TX, and facts — what few we have gotten — can now be analyzed with the clarity of 20/20 hindsight.

Once again, local police who should have been able to confront a maniacal killer chose, instead, to 'play it safe' and wait until the shooting had died down before putting their own lives in danger.  In the end, it was actually a Border Patrol officer who engaged the shooter and ended the standoff.  Reliance on paid, trained professionals has once again proved to be the wrong path to school safety.

Some have suggested that combat veterans, having been in high-stress situations analogous to school shootings, ought be hired as school security guards.  The drawbacks to this should be obvious:  a fair few of the candidates may already suffer from PTSD, and might be more of a danger than a help and, as we have seen before, even paid, trained professionals are often "as useless as tits on a bull".

Allow me to offer a modest proposal:  While not all teachers will be able to act as first responders, to suggest that no teachers will be both willing and able to do so is, frankly, not borne out by the experience of many school districts across the country.  Therefore, I suggest that school districts be mandated to offer to all willing and qualified teachers and staff a "training and readiness stipend" not less than 6% of the employee's annual compensation, in exchange for which the employees will be expected to carry their own firearm (concealed) during their work day.  Whatever training the district deems necessary will be provided by the district at no cost to the employee.

It is clear that school shootings only occur in schools and districts where teachers and staff are prohibited from being armed in their own defense.  There are no countervailing examples.  There have been no school shootings at schools in districts where teachers and/or staff are permitted to be armed during their work day.  The solution to school shootings thus suggests itself:  no districts may be permitted to disallow self-defense by its teachers or staff.

We should expect that "school shootings" will become the stuff of legend, and the few that do still occur never rise to the level of "mass shooting" (4 or more dead per incident).  Anyone who objects to this plan has the obligation to put forward an alternative that, even if only theoretically, works.  Failing that, zip your lip.

 

Uvalde, TX

 

Well, it's happened again.  A mentally-deranged teenager has shot up another school, this time an elementary school in Uvalde, TX.  There seem to have been several warning signs that were handled, not surprisingly, inadequately by the authorities, nineteen 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-graders are dead along with two of their teachers and the shooter who was killed by a Border Patrol officer.  Thoughts and prayers, &c.

Texas, it turns out, allows school districts the option of letting their teachers be armed on the job.  This school district chose not to allow their teachers to be armed.  As a result, the 18-year-old shooter had no opposition after barricading himself in a classroom full of potential victims.

How long are we going to put up with this?  How long are we going to put up with ivory tower academics who are more concerned with the negative P.R. associated with teachers who are ready and willing to defend themselves and their charges?  How long are we going to be bullied by a gun-phobic bloc of teachers who threaten to quit and make a scene if any of their colleagues are permitted to pack heat in their classrooms?

How many dead children are we willing to put up with until we implement a real solution?

 

What Hath Roe Wrought?

 

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Roe v Wade centered around the topic of abortion.  Up to that point, some states allowed it, others prohibited it, and still others regulated it.  The 7-2 decision in Roe was based on an implied right to privacy originating in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  The effect of that decision was that the law on abortion became uniform throughout the 50 states: permitted absolutely in the first trimester, regulated in the second, and prohibited in the third.

When Justice Lewis Powell retired from the court in 1987, President Reagan nominated Robert Bork to replace him.  This was the first of the contentious Supreme Court nominations, so ferocious that it spawned a new verb, to bork (v. tr.), defined as

"To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually to prevent his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way." 

The attacks on Bork were primarily based on his response to a question regarding Roe v Wade, specifically that he thought the Supreme Court should not have opined on the topic since it was clearly a matter of state jurisdiction (that is, the way it was prior to Roe).  Bork's nomination hearings set the pattern for all subsequent Supreme Court nominations, the most recent being those for Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Roe has generated intense controversy over the decades since 1973, virtually none of it related to the notion of "federal legislative authority".

Until now.

Comes now before the court Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that addresses a law in Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks (that Roe presumably permits).  JWHO sued because this was a contraction from the previous limit of 24 weeks.  A firestorm has erupted over the leak of a draft decision in the case that, were it the majority decision, would overturn both Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey and return the entire issue into the hands of state legislatures as it was prior to Roe.

Article I section 8 of the Constitution begins: "Congress shall have power to..." and goes on to list 17 areas of concern that Congress shall have power to legislate in.  There is not a single one of those 17 that can be construed as providing federal jurisdiction over abortion or the states' methods of addressing that issue.

Bork was right, but Bork was an originalist.  He also, unlike too many Americans, too many American judges, and too many American Congressmen, understood the Constitution.

For reasons that are not at all obvious, we apparently now have a Supreme Court that is as smart as Robert Bork.