By Mike Huckabee
March 16, 2018
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Wednesday, just one month after the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the House passed a bipartisan bill called the STOP (Students, Teachers, Officers Prevention) School Violence Act. It’s not the gun control bill liberals are pushing for, but one that actually addresses the direct causes of the problem. It allocates $50 million to the states for improving school safety protocols, setting up anonymous threat reporting systems (that I hope someone will pay attention to!) and training teachers and police in recognizing and responding to students with mental health issues.
It still has to pass the Senate, but considering it got bipartisan support and passed the House by 407-10, maybe it’s something that even the Senate will be able to agree on.
Yesterday, thousands of students walked out of class in a nationwide protest dubbed “National School Walkout Day.” Its organizers hailed it as a grassroots, “the-children-will-lead-us” turning point event that will force adults to yield to the wisdom of youth and pass more gun control laws. Critics called it an astroturfed media event in which naïve students were manipulated and exploited by well-funded leftwing organizations into promoting their political agenda of passing laws that punish law-abiding gun owners while not making schools any safer.
I’ll let you decide which of those is more likely from these two details from the article: it was organized by Empower, the youth wing of the Women’s March movement; and the protest in New York City involved groups of students gathering outside Trump International Hotel to chant, “Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?” (To answer their question: None. No school shootings have ever been carried out by a member of the NRA, although the recent church shooter in Texas was stopped by a neighbor who was an NRA gun training instructor with an AR-15 rifle that the protest organizers would have wanted to keep him from having.)
I’d advise you to look at the article, photos and quotes, to see the deeply emotional argument that’s being made. As I’ve said before, I am a gun owner and an NRA member, and my heart breaks when I hear of any child being a victim of gun violence. If I honestly thought that giving up my guns would save children’s lives, I would do so in an instant.
But I’ve lived long enough and dealt with this issue long enough to know that disarming the law-abiding does not reduce crime, and passing more laws to discourage criminals is useless when breaking laws is what makes someone a criminal to begin with. Someone with bad intent will always be able to buy an arsenal of illegal guns in the time it takes his intended victims to fill out the paperwork to start the process for their waiting periods and background checks. Schools are targeted because they’re soft targets. You don’t prevent that by disarming their protectors, you do it by hardening the targets. And more laws are useless when the people in charge of enforcing them are either unable or unwilling to enforce the laws we already have.
Those who argue that we should let today’s teenagers write laws because many of America’s Founders were also very young should remember that by age 25, the Founders had lived much fuller lives than many people today ever will. They also understood that laws passed in the heat of emotion are almost always bad laws. That’s why they created a system that requires time, debate and compromise, so that cooler heads could prevail.
That’s not to deny the power of emotional protests, nor to downplay the honest feelings behind them. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to choke back tears at one demonstration that used empty shoes to represent the young lives lost, including 17 in Parkland. But how many of the reporters expressing so much concern about those wasted lives even care that Planned Parenthood alone kills 17 babies by abortion every half hour of every day of the year? That’s not the pro-life agenda they care to promote.
I’m glad many on the left are finally recognizing that every life is sacred and that our children deserve protection. So let’s start focusing on societal changes that will actually protect all our children’s lives from the very beginning, whether they are threatened by criminals or madmen with guns or quacks with scalpels.
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