Several Things

With the media blitz in the aftermath of the Santa Fe shooting, some wags are calling for more gun restrictions, but they're awfully short on making sense of themselves.  For example, Powerline links to an AP reporter calling exactly that.

[T]he state’s 20-year dominance by the Republican Party all but guarantees the meetings will be dominated by calls to boost school security and “harden” campuses — an idea backed by the NRA — instead of demands for gun restrictions, said Cal Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

As one cmmmenter said earlier, the call for solutions to this problem often come from people (reporters) who are least familiar with the problem.  I'd ask which "restrictions" might have solved this problem?  The shooter in Texas used a shotgun and a revolver.  Both of these are technology from the 1800s.   How about a law that prohibits people from bringing guns on campus?  We already have that.  How about a law that criminalizes murder?  We already have that too.

Others talk about hardening schools.  Making it more difficult to get into a school.  The problem with that scenario is that when most schools were designed and built back in the '70s, '80s, or '90s, the state-of-the-art was to make schools look like welcoming places.    The high school I worked in, back at the turn of the century, had 14 different entrances in the main building, with two gymnasiums and one other classroom building.  It also had a city street that ran right through it.  The school was designed for ease of access.  That's not a good thing in the current climate.

But, hardening schools, limiting access, changing traffic flows, costs money, and cash-strapped school districts may mot have the available cash to do the re-design.  Remember, these are government facilities with all the design, permitting, and bureaucratic safeguards to impede rapid progress.  But, trust me, school administrators all across the US are thinking about these things.

As horrific as these incidents are, we have to ask ourselves what is driving them?  It's not the gun, the guns have been around forever.  I can remember a simpler time, where I strapped a shotgun to the handlebars of my bicycle and met friends to go hunting.  Several adolescents rode across a goodly portion of town and no one thought anything about it.

So, what's chagend?  The culture.  We have a sub-culture of kids (and I'm excluding jihadis here) who are emulating the very worst possible examples.  This Santa Fe shooting was almost a carbon-copy of the Columbine script..  The problem is not the guns, it is the culture.  Somehow, we have to change the culture.  It won't be easy and it won't be a quick fix, but we have to change the culture.