Our Leaders politicize school shootings but do little to prevent them and may even cause them

Are Washington and Ottawa in a twilight zone where common sense goes to die?

In the past 25 years, at least 130 people, mostly children, have been killed in mass shootings at American public schools. Six of the perpetrators killed themselves, one was killed by law enforcement, and two prosecuted for murder. A brief summary:

2022 Robb Elementary - 21 killed including the shooter

2018 Santa Fe - 10 killed and the shooter prosecuted

2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas - 14 killed and the shooter prosecuted

2015 Umqua - 9 killled and the shooter takes his own life

2012 Sandy Hook - 26 killed and the shooter takes his own life

2007 VA Tech - 32 killed and the shooter takes his own life

2005 Red Lake - 7 killed and the shooter takes his own life

1999 Columbine - 15 killed and the shooter takes his own life

No doubt I have missed some, since mass school shootings are so frequent in United States they are barely newsworthy any more.

Canada has had its share of school shootings, but unlike United States, the victims were usually targeted by the shooter rather than random students.

Political leaders like Joe Biden immediately react to a school shooting with calls for more “gun control” as if that would make a difference. Maybe it would, but Canada’s example shows otherwise. Canada has very strict gun laws and requires anyone wishing to own or use a firearm to first obtain a purchase and acquisiton license (PAL) after taking a safety course for either long guns (called “unrestricted” in Canada), handguns (called “restricted” or “prohibited” depending on the barrel length etc.). The course is detailed and thorough and a passing grade is 80%.

Any Canadian who owns a restricted or prohibited weapon (some people are licensed to own prohibited weapons, but not many, and those who are so licensed are typically law enforcement professionals or military personnel). Any restricted or prohibited weapon is registered with RCMP and its location and transportation are tightly controlled by the Firearms Act.

Despite these controls, which are enforced by stiff prison sentences and fines for any violation, Canada’s school shooting record is no better than that in the United States on a per capita basis.

United States would benefit from emulating Canada’s Firearms Act legislation which, while it has not prevented nutcases from carrying out school shootings, has improved firearm safety materially. Preventing school and other mass shootings is a more complex issue. There are about 131,000 schools in the United States (kindergarten to grade 12) so having an armed security person in every school is sensible and not a material increase in costs of education, and having entrance and egress from schools through single points of entry and egress would facilitate better security.

Turning American schools into armed camps is not a great solution. A real solution is to deal with the divisive nature of society and growing hatred between divisions fueled by political ideology, with political leaders seeing more political capital in that division than in uniting the population. When every act is labeled “racist”, “sexist” “misogynist” “transphobic” “homophobic” or “extremist” it is not hard to understand why young people grow up to hate and some of them to hate enough to kill. America’s “woke” society is the source of the largest amount of discontent and elites, academics and teachers unions promote the divisions with inflammatory rhetoric at every occasion. Even corporate leaders at iconic companies like Disney, Coca Cola and Google are on the “woke” bandwagon, and the hatred gets heated with Twitter mobs attacking people for little more than stating the obvious.

To the best of my memory, Martin Luther King was the last leader to try and unite America and bridge the divisions at least as between races. Since then, political elites have seen more value in promoting division than ameliorating it. Biden promises unity but delivers division. Organizations like Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Proud Boys add fuel to fire since their very existence depends on deep divisions. Democrats apologize for disgraceful conduct by Antifa and BLM activists and Republicans for equally vile conduct by Proud Boys. Politics is now more about choosing sides than about social or fiscal policies.

Canada is no better. Our Prime Minister labels peaceful demonstrators as Nazis, transphobes, homophobes, misogynists and terrorists and invokes the Emergency Act to club them down rather than deal with the reality that their opposition to vaccine mandates was a reasonable dispute over policy. Divisive rhetoric like “reconciliation” doesn’t help, giving ink and oxygen to a process that claims actions by people we never knew hundreds of years ago which harmed people we never knew died hundreds of years ago oblige us to make reparations to people who were never harmed by those actions, most of which predated the very existence of Canada. Divisive policies garner more votes than those that unite us. Rather than seeing everyone as simply “Canadian” our leaders want to parse society into groups, agitate those groups into action pitting them against one another, and profit at the ballot box from their pretend efforts to resolve the ensuing disputes.

I am tired of hearing about LGBTQ+ issues, tired of hearing about “transexuals” as a large oppressed minority, tired of Ottawa pitting Western Canada against Quebec and tired of the divisive nonsense that is the daily bread of our political leaders. I am 77 years old this year and none of the crap that makes headlines today about these issues would have made a sixth page column inch when I was growing up. Our media no longer report news. Instead they make it up since there is more advertising money in creating division than in reporting facts.

The climate change charade is the worse offender. CO2 is harmless but political leaders see it as the rallying cry for a global socialist new world order, something our forefathers, fathers and in my case many of my contemporaries died to keep out of our lives in two world wars and the Cold war. Eric Arthur Blair was prescient enough to see the modern world when he wrote Animal Farm in 1945 (the year I was born) and 1984 in 1949, both under the pen name George Orwell. I was not bright enough to see just how right he was when I read Animal Farm and 1984 as a young student in the 1960’s. But here we are.

Our only hope is the emergence of a straight talking, no nonsense leader who will unify us under the common sense policies that used to prevail - you know, like developing our vast energy resources, abandoning the AGW nonsense for the nonsense it is, repealing the Indian Act and letting First Nations manage their own affairs, keeping critical race theory out of our schools and making sure our youth learn to write intelligibly and master calculus, vector analysis, geometry, physics and chemistry rather than being confused by teachers about whether they are boys or girls. As it stands today, if I were to read an essay from a high school student about the real issues facing society I am confident it would miss the mark by a country mile, be misspelled and have no punctuation.

I think Pierre Poilievre may be that leader. Let’s give him a shot.