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.
-