Conundrum

Which side is more guilty for the slaughter of our school children ... those who are resisting the dilution of our Second Amendment rights ... or those who are resisting placing armed sevurity guards in our schools?

Headlines

[Tim] Kaine: Trump is 'lying' or 'delusional' on DACA

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says Bitcoin will eventually be the single global currency

Israeli intercepts incoming rockets from Gaza Strip ...

[Niki] Haley slams 'foolish' Human Rights Council after 5 new anti-Israel resolutions

Kaine questions whether Bolton can I get security clearance

The economy looks weak in the first quarter, but better days are coming

[March for Our Lives] Crowd count well below expected and initial reports ...

Student activists: Arming teachers puts kids more in danger'

Trump's legal team in flux as he reverses decision on controversial pair

Saudi Air Force intercepts missile over Riyadh, state television says

Flashback: School shootings getting LESS common ...

London homeless DOUBLE after deportations blocked by EU ...

An Experiment

Reading The Diplomad 2.0 today got me to thinking about his suggestion and about what we might do to stop the rash of school shootings. I think we should set up an experiment to see which of two approaches might work better to reduce this mayhem:

Experiment #1: Get rid of school (and other) gun-free zones. For the first ten years, permit and encourage any responsible and trained adult to carry a gun in our schools ... open-carry for any uniformed personnel and closed-carry for others -- teachers, coaches, etc.

Experiment #2: For the second ten years, return to a gun-free zone policy in our schools but totally ban anyone from purchasing semi-automatic military-style rifles or their ammunition.

Comparing the results over this 20-year period should tell us which policy to go with long term. I strongly suspect that this second decade test would not be necessary.

School Shootings

The rash of school shooting of late and, in particular, the recent slaughter in Florida have everyone searching for a solution to this madness. The knee-jerk answer centers around guns and ammunition control. But this seems impractical given our American culture of guns. However, there is another common element that has been growing since 2007 along with the increase in gun and other forms of mayhem. And that is social media -- Facebook, Twitter,Yahoo chat rooms, Instagram, reddit, etc.

It would seem that if we made everyone get a license to use such social media ... and if there were a nation registry of such users and those who should be barred from using them ... and if there were a 30-day waiting period for new users to join such technologies ... and if we could ban any social media that had a scary name or appearance ... then we might begin to control this scourge of school violence.

Obviously, the above was partially tongue in cheek. But there really should be something we can do. It seems everyone was predicting that this nutjob in Florida might some day snap ... and he did. They knew this threat without even a background check. Why couldn't the authorities have taken action ahead of this slaughter ... as soon as he had threatened others? Confiscate his guns and ammunition? Closely monitor him and his social media postings? Even place him in protective custody? Maybe we should even stop sensationalizing these incidents in the national media to discourage copycats?

We are civilized. Let us find a civilized solution other than repealing the Second Amendment.

School Shootings

Liberals seem to have but three solutions to damp down gun violence at schools ... universal background checks, compulsory gun registrations and the outlawing of "assault" rifles with large magazines ... as if the gun commits these heinous crimes. All of these constraints would, in my opinion, do little to stop the rash of school shootings we have recently experienced ... and they would do absolutely nothing to retard the criminals and gang bangers from their wild-west mayhem.

The solution to the rash of urban drive-by shootings would be to start or reinstate stop and frisk ... and the discouraging of the "Black Lives Matter" anti-police movement.

But insofar as fixing the school shooting plague our society needs to focus on the shooter ... and this requires a trade-off between individual liberty and societal good. Thus, I have the following suggestions:

- Relax the HIPAA rules that prohibit mental health workers from reporting incidents of patients who have indicated that they want to kill others. This reporting could be done through a panel of mental-health experts who would review the evidence and decide if it met a threshold of sufficient danger that required further action. If so, then the proper authorities would be notified.

- All American social-media systems should be required to have filters in place that identify individuals who issue radical anti-social threats on their postings ... and then provide information to help law enforcement zero in on these possible killers.

- Existing gun registration systems should be scanned to identify individuals or relatives of individuals who are buying large quantities of guns and ammunition in a short period of time.

- School administrators should be asked to place in a database public data on possible nut cases under their authority ... excluding any information which had not been collected under strict formal disciplinary procedures.

A data mining system should then be constructed that melds the information from these four filters to rank threat levels for possible school shooters ... who then would be interviewed further to determine exactly how dangerous they are ... and incarcerated if necessary. Thus, authorities might proactively reduce or eliminate these school-shooting threats.
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