Where I live, Los Angeles, the average LAPD response time last year was over 5.7 minutes. That’s pretty good. Thirty seconds faster, in fact, than their 2016 response time. Police helicopters hovering within clear earshot are a common occurrence. There are enough bad guys around to keep the cops busy.
But 5.7 minutes is 5.7 minutes too long when one of the bad guys is in your house. That’s why my husband and I have a gun.
So you can imagine my frustration when I read about this week’s school shooting in Kentucky in The New York Times. They predictably blamed their regular targets and spoke to organizations whose solutions have failed. More regulations have not meant fewer shootings. It took them 27 paragraphs before they even mentioned that having fewer gun restrictions is one option that some states and cities use to make schools safer.
“In Kentucky, lawmakers have grappled with how to address the risk of school shootings,” reporters Alan Blinder and Daniel Victor wrote. “Last year, state legislators considered, but did not pass, a bill that would have allowed people with concealed-carry permits to bring weapons on to public school campuses, where proponents argue they could be used to respond to active shooters. A similar bill, limited to college campuses and certain other government buildings, has been introduced this year. It was not immediately clear how the shooting in Benton might affect the debate in Frankfort, the Kentucky capital.”
The article’s headline — “School Shooting in Kentucky Was Nation’s 11th of Year. It Was Jan. 23” — read as if there were armed-to-the-teeth school attackers at large. All of the interviews were from left-wing groups like Moms Demand Action, who jump on every school shooting incident to demand more gun and ammo restrictions.
Of course, for journalists, who know next to nothing about firearms and are mainly based in coastal leftist cities, guns are always the main issue. The parents, the faculty, the school’s security, mental health issues, the culture — these are minor and rarely mentioned. For the Left, the problem is the object, not the person controlling the object.
This anti-gun fetish is not only deceptive; it is dangerous.
One of the victims, Bailey Nicole Holt, called her mother as she died. Can you imagine the pain of that mother as she could hear the chaos but not her dear daughter’s voice? The heartache of learning her baby girl had died, and the “what ifs” of what she could have done to help. I tear up just reading that poor mother’s account of how wonderful her late daughter was and how much she loved her.
But leftists, despite using awful incidents in our nation’s schools to push gun control, don’t really care about women, or mothers being able to defend themselves. They continually fearmonger and misinform about basic statistics regarding gun violence to instill confusion and lies that continually prevent mothers like me from being able to defend our children.
What am I and other mothers supposed to do when we send our children to school? In my mind, either teachers trained in firearm use should be allowed to carry, or there need to be armed security guards. Or both.
The Left tells us that blanket gun restrictions are the best solution to school shootings, but this is nonsense. First, all evidence points to more gun restrictions leading to more crime. Second, Americans will not — will not — agree to European-style gun bans. Nor should we. In the United States, the only way to reduce gun crime is to make sure more good guys have guns.
What do groups like Moms Demand Action say when their anti-gun narrative is disproved by reality? We don’t know because The New York Times never asks.
Like on January 24, 2018, when a Denver neighborhood was on lockdown after two men on the loose shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy? What about the mothers who were locked down for more than two days while cop killers were on the loose? Or, also on January 24, when a female mail worker’s assaulter fled after another woman with a gun came to her defense?
In schools, if we’re going to trust teachers to mold our children’s minds, then why not also trust them with their physical safety? We already leave them alone with our children. Why not allow some of them (only the ones who are willing, of course) to protect our kids if they’ve gone through firearms training and know how to properly use a gun?
If your response is, “I don’t trust my kid’s teacher with a gun” then you shouldn’t trust that teacher with your child at all.
Any death, especially in what should be an area of safety for our children, is heartbreaking and wrong. As a society, we should work to prevent them. But removing Americans’ ability to defend themselves is dangerous.
The media is complicit in the Left’s quest to remove our ability to protect ourselves, so we must be prepared to address their misinformation. We must be willing to stand up for ourselves and our children’s safety by doing what is best for all women.