Thursday, February 15, 2018

The Solution to the Public School Shootings Problem



By Robert Wenzel

The shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in  Parkland Florida once again highlight the inability of government to protect even our innocent youth. As I point out in chapter 1 of my upcoming book, Foundations of Private Property Theory,  government does very little actual protecting. It is a myth.

Because there is a national program that teaches students how to react to a shooter---the program mostly tells students to cower in a corner and hope the shooter doesn't come into your room, it set up a perfect kill zone for the killer. The Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, knew exactly what to expect when he went on his shooting rampage, as he wrote on social media, unarmed "sheep."

Of course. the pathological altruists, who have their logic and emotional wires crossed, will once again call for the banning of guns. That is, since the government can't protect our kids, let's make it so only the government and bad guys, who will ignore the ban, will have guns. In other words, let's move the entire country in the direction of sheep like the defenseless kids who were gunned down yesterday. In other words, they want to make the country an entire defenseless kill zone.

The real solution is
much simpler. Get government out of the education business so that those of us who don't want out kids treated like sheep have many more options.

The shooting took place at a high school. It is not unreasonable to think that high school kids would be capable of knowing how to handle guns and take out nut jobs if they threaten. Maybe you let the kids carry guns. They did in the old days. Maybe you train the kids and keep the guns behind glass to be broken in the case of emergency. Maybe you train the teachers to shoot and have them carry.

Or maybe you do the opposite and secure all entrances so that it is near impossible for anyone with a gun to get inside.

Or maybe you do nothing if you think the shootings are a far-off outlier (There are over 35,000 high schools in the United States). Maybe you homeschool your kids. Or you send them to prep schools where the student body is under 300, making the odds of a shooter amongst them very low.

There are certainly other solutions that I haven't even thought of but the macro solution is to get government out of the education business. The government is terrible at education, just look at the urban primitives coming out of public schools, and they obviously have no idea of how to protect our kids.

We need to turn to free market creativity on full blast in the education sector and in the student protection sector.

In the days ahead we will no doubt hear from President Trump and other politicians as to what should be done to protect our students. Just remember it was the government program that set these kids up to be in a kill zone.

The answer is not a new government plan. The answer is competition should be allowed to develop so that all types of programs are developed and then we get to choose how we want to protect our kids.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of  EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. The Robert Wenzel podcast is on  iphone and stitcher.

10 comments:

  1. Interesting idea about a gun behind glass for emergency, and a great example to illustrate the point of your post.

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  2. Your example of "securing" all doors so no one can get inside appears to already be actual policy at the gov't schools in my area. Being a homeschooling parent, I had to do some business at an event held at such a school and was struck by the severe written warnings and instructions posted for arriving "guests", gigantic locking mechanisms, and full-on steel doors at every entrance. It really added a "supermax" flavor to the school to prison pipeline criticism of gov't schooling.

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  3. “Because there is a national program that teaches students how to react to a shooter---the program mostly tells students to cower in a corner and hope the shooter doesn't come into your room, it set up a perfect kill zone for the killer. The Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, knew exactly what to expect when he went on his shooting rampage, as he wrote on social media, unarmed "sheep."”

    This is so true. It reminds me of Die Hard when Hans Gruber knew that the FBI would, by the book, cut the power in response to his hostage-taking, allowing him to defeat the vault’s time lock.

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  4. The shooter had been in and out of mental health treatment. What head-shrink drugs had he been prescribed to take? Some of these drugs have been shown to cause users to become suicidal and or violent. I understand that this is especially true when they suddenly stop taking their meds.

    What would treatments for mental health be in a free market?

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    1. Every mass killing in the US in the past decade, has had one thing in common. Prescription drugs prescribed by a mental health professional. That includes the mom's that drown their children. Very sad! But the media ignores the connection.

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  5. The River at Tampa Bay Church got it right. They posted a sign reading:

    WELCOME TO THE RIVER AT TAMPA BAY CHURCH – RIGHT OF ADMISSION RESERVED – THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY

    PLEASE KNOW THIS IS NOT A GUN FREE ZONE - WE ARE HEAVILY ARMED - ANY ATTEMPT WILL BE DEALT WITH DEADLY FORCE - YES WE ARE A CHURCH AND WE WILL PROTECT OUR PEOPLE - THE PASTORS

    http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/Tampa-church-warns-We-are-armed-and-ready-to-use-deadly-force_162712686

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  6. RW - great response. Perhaps I misunderstand your use of the term "power centers." By allowing teachers and/or students to be armed you have increased the number of power centers. Each armed person becomes a power center. This seems at odds with your call to reduce the number of power centers in previous comments.

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    1. Power is the problem if, by "power", we mean the power of one person over another. Authority = parasite. However, more power centers may be said to be good because they are smaller, more local, and thus easier to deal with.

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  7. There's something ironic about those on the (anti-gun) left saying that Trump is literally Hitler, and yet arguing that only the government should have guns.

    Moreover, for all the hatred of guns among a certain portion of society, they don't seem to realize that their entire system only works because certain people -- the state's goons -- have guns.

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    1. It’s also kind of ironic that the slaughter of the unarmed is trotted out as irrefutable evidence that people should be unarmed.

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