Steve Frey
If you are like most Americans, you watched the news with tears welling in your eyes last Friday night as you listened to high school students talk about the terror of a mass shooting at their school—again.
This time, 10 people were killed and 13 injured. The lives of many others who survived have been changed forever.
Most people have committed their thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. For many, that is where it ends. They will go on with their lives, and soon this will be old news and forgotten—until it happens again.
Complacency is what America should fear most. Numb to the regular slaughter of innocent Americans in schools, at concerts, and in theaters, some will ignore the crying of children and the anguish of parents across the country.
If you are upset about people using guns to kill children, you are also frustrated. Americans are problem solvers; Americans are doers. For most Americans, it is anathema to sit and watch children regularly get murdered at school and see nothing change.
There is only one thing that will remedy this situation: Vote for candidates in the 2018 elections who support common sense gun safety laws. This can be done and still support the 2nd Amendment. Read on.
When the majority of Americans are moved to find solutions to the problem, and they vote for candidates who care and support legislation to protect them, real change can take place.
It doesn’t have to be the “all or nothing” choice foisted upon the country by gun organizations or opposition groups. Most people want sensible regulation. There is a middle way to solving this problem besides arming everyone or eliminating all guns.
America is steeped in gun culture. From frontier days, hunting and home protection have been a part of the everyday lives of Americans, and that will not change.
But let’s face facts: America has a problem with guns and mass murder that other countries do not. Two researchers, Jaclyn Schildkraut of the State University of New York at Oswego and H. Jaymi Elsass of Texas State University, analyzed mass shootings in 11 countries from 2000-2014.
Aside from the United States, they looked at Australia, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland. The United States had more mass shootings—and more people killed or injured total—than the other 10 nations COMBINED.
Based on all of that, here is a “Big 10” list of gun safety ideas for consideration:
1. Find ways to prevent insane people from having guns.
2. Prevent violent criminals from having them (terrorists on a watch list fit here, too).
3. Domestic abusers should not have a gun.
4. Have intense background checks and a sufficient waiting period to complete them. Of course, these checks have to be universal across the United States.
5. Eliminate all loopholes for gun shows, private sales, etc.
6. Enact safety rules where guns must be locked in a safe or with gunlocks to prevent anyone but the owner from using them. If the owner is negligent and it leads to a crime, hold him responsible, too.
7. Magazines should be limited to 10 or fewer rounds so that responders have a chance to intervene when the shooter is reloading.
8. “Bump stocks,” which create the effect of automatic weapons, should be banned. Include silencers and armor-piercing bullets here, too.
9. Combat-style assault weapons should no longer be sold, and current owners must obtain a special license for use in target practice at licensed facilities.
10. You must hold a permit for each gun you own.
Notice that this does not preclude anyone from having a gun for hunting, target practice or home protection.
This is not a general ban on guns; it is a list of common sense laws that will limit the opportunity and severity of mass shootings.
Some of the fees used for background checks and licenses could even go to school divisions to “harden” them with proactive physical barriers and to supplement the cost of resource officers.
These ideas are not new. Will they eliminate all mass shootings? No. But if one life can be saved, or hundreds, isn’t it worth it? If your child could be better protected, wouldn’t it be worth it to you?
So here is how you can be proactive and help with this problem. First, vote for candidates who will support the Big Ten gun safety concepts.
Next, support local school divisions so that teachers have small pupil-teacher ratios and can know their students extremely well.
Provide training for school staff in developing and maintaining relationships with students and identifying emotional or problem issues that may emerge.
There also needs to be a low student-counselor/school psychologist ratio, so students who need counseling receive it in a timely and, if necessary, extended manner.
A school resource officer is necessary at each school. The officer should be involved in all aspects of the school program and teach character development lessons, help implement anti-bullying programs, plan and analyze emergency drills and develop relationships with students in class, lunch, recess, hallways and elsewhere throughout the school.
Our schools currently do a great job, but some need more resources, especially in identifying and counseling the young, white males who are the primary killers.
Next, police departments across the country need to be fully staffed, social services departments need to have adequate personnel and funding and community health/counseling services need to be expanded.
No, the United States is not like England, Germany, Norway or other countries. It has a deeply embedded gun culture that is unique in the world.
A disturbed student in the U.S. has easy access to weapons, and that is a formula for possible disaster.
We need to find ways to mitigate the chance that a student can have emotional problems without appropriate attention, get his hands on weapons and foil the security systems in place at a school.
There is a middle way. We can have guns for hunting and home security AND safety procedures to stop some of the killings in America.
But the narrative needs to be changed from shutting down any gun safety ideas at all to working together to prevent mass murders through sensible, proactive intervention.
That won’t happen until representatives who care about people more than power, money and control are elected to legislative office.
You can make a difference; you CAN do something. You just need to vote for people who care in November.
Steve Frey is a writer and CEO of Ascendant Educational Services based in Radford. He also covers city council and school board meetings for the Radford News Journal
