Never, never again?

We must protect our kids and our communities

Will this nation never say never again to school shootings? The deaths Friday of at least 10 people, most reportedly students, at Santa Fe High School, in southeast Texas, would seem to argue, “never.”

We are desensitized to these shootings now. The talking heads on the ubiquitous televisions that seem to steal the sound and space in every public place announce the grim news like the weather, and then go back to happy chat and stupid jokes. No one is stunned. No one is speechless. And no one is outraged.

And yet our children are regularly being slaughtered in their schools.

President Donald Trump changed his mind about Syria when he saw pictures of dead children gassed by the brutal regime. Maybe that’s what it will take here.

The president is the key to getting action on school safety, which should be the focus now. Forget the broad issue of “gun control” for the moment. Secure the schools.

As Andrew Pollack, father of Meadow, killed in the last mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., said at the White House: We made the highways as safe as we could with decent roads and safe cars. We secured air travel, for the most part. We banned child labor and have made most workplaces relatively safe. There a proximate solution to school shootings.

And if we do not secure our schools, we have lost all self-respect as a people.

School shootings are not a natural phenomena, or even typical modern social phenomena. They are an American phenomena.

Mr. Trump is the ultimate pragmatist. He has offered to feed and rebuild North Korea and even to help Chinese businesses hurt by our trade policies. He is our first independent president — he belongs to a party but he does not come from it and he is not bound by it. He also likes to surprise.

The president has a chance to break the deadlock on school safety, and make history. As a National Rifle Association hero, he is uniquely positioned to do so. Much like Nixon going to China, or Trump going to North Korea.

The president should convene a White House meeting of 10 of the nation’s top police chiefs, 10 key members of Congress, and 10 scholars in the fields of mental health, criminology and sociology and make the object of the meeting a short-term and a long-term action plan to secure our schools.

The options to be considered should not be limited or grouped ideologically, but only separated by what we can do now and what we can seek later. A trained security officer for every school in the United States should be on the table. Safe rooms for every school should be, too. Obviously, strict gun registration and waiting periods, along with screening for mental health, should be on the table.

New approaches should be welcome.

Long term, weapons of war should be banned for civilian use. No one needs them to exercise his Second Amendment rights or to hunt for food, and we all know that. Individual rights do not have absolute veto power over the good of the community.

It is axiomatic that nothing we do will guarantee 100 percent school security.

But it should be abundantly clear by now that doing nothing yields no new result, ever. Not one human life is saved by acceptance and passivity.

We need to think this through together. And we are not thinking now. We are blathering all this out of our collective consciousness. We are anesthetizing ourselves. (One talking head on the tube asked: “What was the motive?”

for a mass shooting in a high school?)

If we continue along the path of “nothing can be done,” one wonders how long our nation and our way of life can survive. If we have so little regard for human life that we can only shrug at the slaughter of children, then we have lost our national will to endure.