President Trump, LOOK AT THIS MAP!!! Every dot represents a university, college, high school, or elementary school shooting in the US over the past 50 years. The number of dots exceeds 1300. These shootings have killed 650 children and young adults and maimed, many for life, over 1000 children and young adults. Then there are the psychological victims — the survivors and victims’ parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors, all of whom will spend every day, if not every hour, of the rest of their lives recalling the shooting they personally experienced and the victims.
Wednesday’s shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school killed an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old and injured 15 other children plus 3 adults. President Trump, you tweeted, in lower caps, “Please join me in praying for everyone involved.” Unfortunately, prayers won’t bring back these two beautiful children or heal the 15 other beautiful children now in hospitals.
What we needed is for you to tweet in caps, “I AM GOING TO END SCHOOL SHOOTINGS!!!”
Doing so could actually earn you the Nobel Peace Prize you so desperately desire. For starters, you could deploy and redeploy the National Guard in every state to every school and campus in the country to provide security. Minnesota currently has enough National Guard troops to post roughly 3 troopers at each school and campus in the state.
Second, you could ensure the installation of perimeter gates with metal detectors outside all schools. Only 10 percent of schools currently have metal detectors, let alone exterior gates.
Third, you could treat schools as high-security prisons, but not to lock people in, but to lock people out. This means a security office manned 24/7 with exterior and interior cameras so that no one can wander undetected inside or outside a school or campus building.
If we can track missing luggage and cell phones, we certainly can track intruders who aren’t carrying proper ID cards/tags on their persons.
Fourth, you could establish a special unit of the FBI to screen social media and interview school authorities to identify likely shooters. In 2018, the Secret Service published a report on school shootings and concluded that “many of the tragedies could have been prevented … using a threat assessment model.”
That was over 200 school shootings ago. How many more will it take for you to assign the Department of Homeland Security to provide this vital form of homeland security?
Fifth, you, and only you, can stand up to the NRA and get Congress to ban assault weapons. Almost 60 percent of school shootings now involve use of assault weapons.
Sixth, you can get Congress to pass a federal law making gun owners criminally responsible, under major penalties in the form of jail time and/or financial fines, for any use of firearms by minors and those who haven’t passed appropriate background checks or had access to unsecured firearms.
Seventh, you can get Congress to pass laws requiring universal background checks, safe firearm storage requirements, and inclusion by gunmakers of biometric readers on their firearms to ensure they are only used by their owners.
Eighth, you can get Congress to pass a law making failure of parents, school officials, therapists, and others to report/identify/document those who appear to represent a threat to public safety subject to criminal penalties.
These and other measures will be far more effective than your prayers in ending school shootings. They will also help end the equally horrifically large number of mass shootings outside of schools and campuses.
We don’t need National Guard picking up trash in Union Station or patrolling the Washington Monument. We don’t need a president who makes peace abroad, but ignores the war on our children at home. We need a MSSA president — a president who MAKES SCHOOLS SAFE AGAIN.
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Hopefully, this will be an idea whose time has come!
Please stick to economics. While you have good points , we have plenty of political opinion pieces to read. Write about tariffs and when they will hit the inflation stats, write about bond yields , labor and how deportations will raise cost of labor and increase prices…. Anything but this…