School shootings response can be simple and effective

To fully understand a problem like terrorism, you need to accept complexity, a sprawl of general factors — personal, historical, cultural — converging in a specific movement or a single actor. The kind of mass-murdering, effectively-suicidal terrorism that has taken hold in America in the 23 years since Columbine is no different.

But an important truth about policymaking — a conservative truth, in many contexts — is that you don’t have to fully understand a problem’s roots in order to do something about it. There’s no simple path to a future America where young men like the killer in Uvalde, Texas — may his name be blotted out — no longer seek apotheosis through mass murder. But as long as we live in this America, I want the next teenager with an obvious set of warning flags — severe familial disorder, self-harm, violent online threats — to find it much harder to turn 18 and immediately acquire a high-powered weapon.

Don’t give me a fanciful general war on guns or a general “hardening” of elementary schools. Give me policies, the simpler the better, that would stand between some meaningful percentage of mass shooters and their arsenals.

We have a decent sense of what those policies might be. The people drawn to this kind of terrorism are overwhelmingly of a type — young, troubled, socially awkward men. They are not necessarily gun experts, prepared to retrofit any weapon they acquire for maximal lethality, nor are they necessarily experts at navigating black markets to acquire weapons. And they often expose their intentions in advance.

Yes, some will overcome all obstacles or strike without warning. But many others, including those like the Uvalde shooter, seem potentially deterrable at the point of weapon acquisition. As the University of Alabama criminologist Adam Lankford told The Dispatch, “if you make buying a firearm more difficult for people who find it difficult to do anything socially, that makes a difference.”

Those difference-making difficulties could be imposed via restrictions that target age and weapon type at once. Or they could be imposed through laws encouraging preemptive action by parties who might see the threat coming. Age requirements for the purchase of AR-15S and other semi-automatic rifles fall into the first category; red-flag laws, which enable interventions that temporarily strip dangerous people of their guns, are the best example of the second approach.

I’m open to both, but my current policy preference is slightly different. I worry that red-flag laws demand too much of bystanders and family members. I’m not sure an age limit of 21 covers enough of the young male danger zone.

So I would like to see experiments with agebased impediments rather than full restrictions — allowing would-be gun purchasers 25 and under the same rights of ownership as 40- or 60-yearolds, but with more substantial screenings before a purchase. Not just a criminal-background check, in other words, but some kind of basic social or psychological screening, combining a mental-health check, a social-media audit and testimonials from two competent adults — all subject to the same appeals process as a well-designed red-flag law.

There’s a future where America’s gun-ownership rate is as high as ever, where schools still look like schools rather than airport security lines and where 18-year-olds under a demoniac shadow face meaningful obstacles to arming themselves for terrorism. Let’s try living there, and see what happens.