The School Shooting

If we had a clear solution to these things, we would have found it by now. We haven’t for at least three reasons. Because there is no way of predicting with any confidence which extremely rare young man will do a shooting like this versus the much more common young man who merely looks anti-social, threatening and bad; because we know that no solution or set of solutions will work to completely eliminate these episodes (and hence that we're going to get more of them regardless of what we do); and because any of the possible solutions entails very unappetizing tradeoffs and costs, costs that one large segment of the electorate or the other fears and resents, and believes are merely the camel's nose of yet more and even worse costs its opponents not-so-secretly have in mind.

This is why we’re stuck.

And there’s one other thing that’s obvious but, oddly, unremarked upon so far as I’ve been able to find: The person most clearly responsible, the shooter, is dead. Since the impulse to find someone to blame is justifiably pressing, but the main malefactor is gone, we are left with an overload of anger looking for a place to land. Thus, by default, it gets directed at All The Usual Suspects — meaning that our ancient debates merely get repeated, only with more bitterness this time, given the extent of the horror and the ages of the children murdered.

So what is to be done?

A thoughtful framework for analysis was set forth yesterday by Dan McLaughlin in his article in National Review. Among other things, McLaughlin observes:

[T]here are three different angles to a school shooting: the shooter, the weapon, and the target. Potential solutions should look at all three angles, especially because no solution is likely to be 100 percent effective, at least not unless we adopt massively draconian and disproportionate restrictions on a free society, its gun owners and sellers, its teachers, its schoolchildren, and/or its police. As I have discussed at length before, there are some partial solutions to be found in “arm the teachers” and other methods of hardening the target of schools, but conservatives who focus only on the target are making the same mistake as progressives who focus only on the weapon. There may be more targeted ways to tie weapons-related solutions to shooter-related solutions. But fundamentally, the source is the shooters: typically alienated young men, often fatherless, sometimes with substance issues, often [but not always — my addition] with a very long trail of obvious red flags.

And therein lies a big clue: If this is to be solved, we’re going to have to get out of our comfort zones. For conservatives, the problem with applying criminal law as usually seen — as a deterrent, as punitive, retributive, or even rehabilitative — is that some people are beyond all four models. They are deviant probably to an incomprehensible degree. Conservatives are thus very likely going to have to accept more gun control-type legislation than they want, in particular background checks. For their part, liberals are going to have to accept that society and social inequities, ever the Left’s whipping boys, can’t rationally be blamed this time, and continuing with that drumbeat is just partisan silliness.

Two, as with any real problem, there are costs to every possible solution: “Human beings are the real weapons of mass destruction, and the tools they choose are not the causes of violence. If we want to weed out people who might commit violent acts in the future, we need to scale back due process protections and incarcerate more people on less evidence. Although that too is a trade-off many of us would find it hard to make, we could plausibly target privacy laws that make it difficult to compile records on people with a history of threatening behavior . . . There are only easy answers if you are willing to sacrifice rights you don’t care about, and that other people do.”

If there are any liberals left reading this entry, I hope their heads have not exploded. Over the last couple of days, we have seen many on the Left say that what’s needed is “early intervention for obviously troubled youth.” But what does that mean, exactly? Do these youth get institutionalized merely because they’re “troubled”? Try running that one past the ACLU. But if they’re not institutionalized, they’re going to be able to get guns, and they’ll be able to do this regardless of what gun control legislation we adopt (as the Buffalo shooter from May 14 was able to get guns in a jurisdiction that already has rigorously strict gun control). They can borrow them, steal them, or get them on the black market. It’s just not going to be that hard.

So: Is a relaxation of due process welcome in order to allow more frequent and (possibly) effective early intervention? This is a prime example of the unappetizing costs noted earlier. The Left will say no on the grounds that we already have too many people under incarceration or incarceration-adjacent supervision. The Right will say no on the grounds that “early intervention” under relaxed due process is simply a pretext to balloon already excessive government power over families and children — and that’s assuming such a program could or would be conducted in good faith.

Three, laws only matter if they are enforced, and enforcing them means cops. Conservatives and Republicans have long supported aggressive and uniform enforcement of laws against gun crime and illegal guns. A “war on guns” conducted with more seriousness, however, would look like the War on Drugs on steroids. Moreover, if the Left mistrusts cops, the Right mistrusts bureaucrats who would doubtless use civil enforcement powers against political enemies.

Did I say something about getting out of our comfort zones? And it gets worse: For those, like me, who tend for the most part to trust the police — and who see no realistic alternative — it now appears that the Uvalde police made a grotesque and incomprehensible error in thinking that they could wait to invade the school. According to this new WSJ report, the police commander held back for more than an hour because he believed no lives were at risk despite multiple 911 calls from children inside.

Four, numbers aren’t everything, but they should inform our sense of proportion in nationwide policy-making. Some perspective on the size of the problem and the direction of the trend is always important. The Associated Press counts 169 deaths in 23 years. That’s a lot in absolute terms, especially when we’re discussing innocent schoolchildren. But it is also seven deaths per year, compared with 43 per year by lightning, 300 per year by toasters, 800 per year by bedsheets, and of course, over 800,000 per year by abortion. We can also compare the number with problems such as Central and South American gangs that liberals and progressives commonly dismiss as insignificant threats.

There is perhaps a case to be made that, given the relatively small scale of the problem when seen in context (yes, I know how awful that sounds), and the nature and serious cost to our wallets and our values that many of the proposed solutions would entail, the thing to do is: nothing. I am not yet ready to accept a conclusion that grim, however. One thing I think could be done is the posting of at least two well-trained armed guards inside the school, one at the main (or perhaps the only) entrance, and the other somewhere else, so can’t both be taken out at the same time. One thing the Uvalde episode teaches is that it’s necessary to have officers ready, willing and able to fight back already inside the school.

Will that solve the whole problem? Almost certainly not. But we have to start somewhere. If liberals can abide guards at their gated communities, they can abide them to protect the lives of fourth graders.