The Newtown School Shooting And What It Should Tell Us

 

A horrible, almost unimaginable tragedy occurred today at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, near Danbury, Connecticut.

Somehow an armed gunman managed to sneak on campus armed with a handgun and a .223 rifle and gun down 27 people. That death toll includes 18 children, and the gunman. It's not known for certain at present whether he was shot by police officers or killed himself, although CBS is reporting the latter.

The killer, identified as 24-year-old Adam Lanza, was the son of a female teacher at the school who was killed in the mass shooting. Most of the deaths occurred in her classroom. Ms. Lanza taught kindergarten.*

Lanza's older brother is also in custody, for reasons unknown.

Ironically, the school had just implemented new safety protocols. They included:

• Locking all exterior doors during the day.
• Visitors required to ring the doorbell and register at the office.
• Photo ID and passes required for visitors.

None of it helped.

What also didn't help was that there was absolutely no provision for training and arming of qualified teachers or administrators. This atrocity occurred in a legally mandated gun-free zone.

It's worth mentioning that these sort of mass killings in schools were unknown until President Clinton's Gun Free Schools Act was passed and signed by the president in 1994. That law required all states to put laws in place to prohibit firearms on school campuses, regardless of the state laws on firearms and concealed carry.

The teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary obeyed the law. Some of them, and some of the innocent children they had charge of are dead because of it.

The maniac who murdered these people could have cared less. He broke the law simply by taking a firearm onto school property even if a brief moment of sanity had asserted itself and he managed to never pull the trigger.

The left will never acknowledge this basic truth. They will never admit to the connection between President Clinton's Gun Free Schools Act, the deaths today and the preventable deaths previously, and they will shamefully exploit this senseless tragedy for 'political capital' to try to further erode our rights to self defense..thus leading to more horrible and needless incidents like today's.

They will never admit to any of it, because their agenda has nothing to do with 'preventing gun violence'. It has to do with attacking that most individual of the Bill of Rights, the right to preserve your life and that of your loved ones.

The Bill of Rights was written for the express purpose of declaring what government may not do, and thus establishing the limits of governmental tyranny towards individuals. Without the right to choose to be armed, none of the other rights are defensible. That's exactly why the Left wants it gone. If they are able to ghoulishly use this tragedy to get their way, (and they will almost certainly try) the rest of those individual rights can be taken away easily.

In 'The Prince', Machiavelli wrote 'To be disarmed is not only to be defenseless, but despised.' Like it or not, he was entirely correct.

The wealthy, the members of the political elite and their families are amply protected by either private security or security paid for by the taxpayers. Legislation stripping away the protection of those they rule will only lead to more and more innocent deaths, as they're left defenseless.

The killings at Sandy Hook are an example.

Connecticut's gun laws are some of the strictest in the nation, modeled on neighboring New York state's statutes. None of these laws would have stopped Adam Lanza.

He was known to the school's personnel, so he was allowed in without question. The firearms he used were registered not to him, but to his mother. In fact Lanza tried to obtain a rifle in his own name, but was denied because of his history of mental illness. So he simply stole his mother's weapons. He could just as easily decided to kill with a machete or with an explosive device.Or if he wanted a gun badly enough, he would have found a way to obtain one. Someone who really doesn't care what's legal and illegal will always find a way. In his state of mind, it didn't matter.

So, how do we stop the Adam Lanzas of the future?

We don't. A psychotic is a psychotic. Like a drunk driver, sometimes you just run into one. or they run into you.

But there are things we can do to both minimize the damage and the occurrences.

First, the media needs to clean up their collective act. We live in an 'American Idol' society, where everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, especially younger teens growing up in what more and more seems a deliberate destruction of our culture and traditional values.

A lot of the Adam Lanzas seem to want to essentially get that fame by committing what amounts to suicide publicly by taking a lot of innocent lives with them. Imagine the effect on wannabes and copycats if it was denied them?

You can't stop the media from reporting on stories, unless it's something like Fast and Furious that doesn't fit the agenda.But there's nothing that says they have to mention the killer's name. The story can be fully reported without it.

After all, the media has been known to go to enormous lengths to avoid mentioning race or ethnicity when it comes to crime or terrorism unless the perpetrator happens to be white.Why not eliminate that one detail of a name and deny potential Lanzas the added gratification of going out famous? Isn't it worth a try?

The most important thing that would prevent more tragedies like Sandy Hook is repealing President Clinton's 1994 Gun Free Schools Act. Allow individual states to decide whether or not to allow trained teachers or administrators to have firearms on campus based on their gun laws and let's see the results after a few years.

In Israel, schoolteachers and security guards are routinely armed and have received excellent training, almost all of them having been in the military. Most schools have contingency 'what if' plans.

 

(photo courtesy of Powerline)

In spite of the obvious dangers of terrorism and the fact that a large part of the population is in the reserves and has military assault weapons at home, with two exceptions there's never been an incident anything remotely like today's killings at Sandy Hook and both involved Arab terrorism.

The Israelis learned a bitter lesson in 1974 when a patrol of Arab terrorists took over a school and murdered 25 hostages including 22 children using grenades and automatic weapons during the Ma'alot massacre.They took contingency measures and teachers were allowed to be armed in classrooms to try and prevent anything like that happening again.It worked.

The last time anything like Ma'alot was attempted in Israel was at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in 2008 before the security barrier was fully completed. An Arab terrorist broke in while the students were at their religious studies. And while 8 religious students were horribly slain, the death toll was mitigated when two IDF soldiers, former students who happened to be visiting the yeshiva took out the Arab killer with their personal firearms.

Ask yourself how many of the children murdered today might be alive if there had been some armed and trained adults available to confront Adam Lanza in the only way possible.

You don't defend the innocent against insanity and murder by legislation. You do it by being ready, willing and able to take up arms on their behalf to protect them.

That's the message we should take away from what happened today at Sandy Hook Elementary.


UPDATE: * The dinosaur media in their rush to get this story out got a number of things dead wrong.One of them concerned Adam Lanza's mother. She was apparently not a teacher at the school, and we now know she was murdered at home by her son in her bed before he went to the school.