We are not powerless to stop school shootings

Arming teachers is not a legitimate solution. Anyone who proposes such an answer is not to be taken seriously.

A “good guy with a gun” isn’t the answer. There are too many documented cases where armed guards or police officers have been on the scene or close at hand, and the killings happened anyway.

Turning schools into prisons, with one heavily guarded entrance, is not realistic. It wouldn’t be advisable, anyway — schools are by nature some degree of chaotic, which is what happens when a bunch of kids get together in one place. Specially designed schools aimed at warding off shooters would be a huge waste of money.

Mental health among young people is a real crisis, but people who are facing mental health crises are vastly more likely to be a danger to themselves than to anyone else. At the same time, nearly every politician who proposes a focus on mental health is in reality slashing spending in that area.

We can’t declare war on evil, even as anyone who has been around a while will remember that such a plan was the real-life basis of our post-9/11 foreign policy. There will always be people who want to commit terrible acts, and there’s almost never a way to know who they are in advance. This isn’t realistic.

It’s not about video games or violent movies — every country has those, but not every country has our problems.

Lockdown drills don’t work, and we know enough by now to conclude that they’re counterproductive. Not only do they traumatize children, but an entire generation of potential perpetrators is by now well-versed in how they work. They know the routine as well as anyone.

We know all this because we’ve had a decade to talk about it. Every argument has been made and rehashed endlessly in the past 10 years. What’s so hard to take in the wake of the Uvalde elementary school massacre is how familiar it all feels. It’s a sickening feeling.

There is something that could have been done in those 10 years that might have such a recurrence less likely, and that is to limit, or end, the availability of the weapon that was used. It wouldn’t eliminate the risk, because there are millions of such guns in the country and they could feasibly continue to circulate for decades to come. But limiting their sale could have an impact.

There’s a common thread in many mass shootings that make news nationwide, and it’s that the perpetrator acquired his guns legally. They didn’t go on the black market or buy them in a private sale —0 they went to a dealer and bought them, the same way you’d buy a household appliance. Close off that avenue, and you might prevent some carnage.

It wouldn’t stop everything. It wouldn’t affect the daily background of gun violence on American streets, which is overwhelmingly because of handguns.

But we have an obligation to take steps that would reduce the likelihood of another Uvalde. Opponents of new gun regulations argue that criminals don’t pay attention to laws, which is akin to arguing against any laws at all. And it is belied by the fact that the shooter in Texas apparently waited until he was legally able to buy the guns before he acquired them. Laws can have an impact.

The entire debate is exhausting, because opponents of new gun laws are not arguing in good faith. We take as a baseline that everyone involved wants to find a way to prevent this from happening again, but that may be an assumption that isn’t backed up with facts. If everyone wanted school shootings to stop, we wouldn’t act the way we do as a country. We wouldn’t need our state’s representative in the U.S. Senate to literally beg his counterparts to pass some legislation, anything, to try to prevent another tragedy.

We’re not powerless to effect change, but we are held back by powerful people who still, even with everything that’s happened, lack the drive to make the world even slightly better. Some of them are Democrats, the party that nominally controls the levers of power in Washington but is effectively limited by its most uncooperative members. The only realistic solution is to put better people in charge, people who are not so committed to our violent status quo.

There may be nothing we can do to prevent this from happening again. There are surely steps we can take to make it less likely. At this point in our country’s trajectory, that appears to be the best that we can hope for.