Republican politicians really, really don’t want to acknowledge that the reason the United States has such exceptional levels of gun violence is our exceptional obsession with and access to guns. That, after all, might imply the need for additional restrictions on the availability of firearms. So they cast about for other possible causes, and therefore other possible solutions.
Why stop at ‘hardening’ schools? Today, everywhere is a ‘soft target.’
When not blaming “mental health” challenges for mass shootings (while simultaneously cutting access to mental health care), they’ve been blaming schools for being “soft targets.”
The solution, from a predictable Republican chorus, is that schools must be “hardened.”
Schools have too many doors, suggested Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). A single point of egress is key to avoiding the slaughter of children (forget fire safety).
Or maybe schools merely need more bulletproof glass and (kid-friendly!) ballistic blankets, said Cruz, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and other conservative commentators. Or they need to employ armed officers on campus, declared Donald Trump. No matter that Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, like the school massacre site in Parkland, Fla., already had such an officer; or that the weapon the Uvalde shooter was able to purchase legally was so terrifying that even police on the scene feared it.
Maybe teachers themselves need to be allowed and encouraged to carry weapons. Oops, that’s already been the case in Texas for about a decade. The program was expanded in 2019, shortly after a different campus mass shooting, at a high school in the Houston area.
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FollowNever mind that such proposals are fundamentally unserious, impractical or have been tried and proved insufficient for preventing mass murder. Never mind that 96 percent of U.S. public schools already conduct lockdown drills; that many schools are already heavily surveilled fortresses; that there is already a multibillion-dollar school-security industrial complex.
Never mind that the same factions who have argued that mask-wearing and books about Tommy’s two mommies are unacceptably traumatizing for young children are now implying that kindergartners should be kitted out with makeshift body armor.
Perhaps, with unlimited funds and an indifference to child psychology, every school could be converted to something akin to a maximum-security prison. Perhaps a moat and a round-the-clock occupying army could thwart a few more evildoers hoping to gun down children.
But even if all that were practical, schools are hardly the only “soft” targets that regularly serve as backdrops for butchery.
In the days since 19 children and two teachers were murdered in Uvalde, Tex., there have been at least 21 mass shootings across the country, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization that defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter. The carnage occurred at a hospital, a nightclub, several house parties, an outdoor festival, a bar, a vacant lot, a cemetery and a car show, among other locales.
These are hardly the only scenes of mass violence and mass tragedy in recent years. By the logic of Republicans resisting firearm restrictions, the only way to preserve innocent life is to also “harden” all those other “soft” sites that have been targeted before, and that remain vulnerable to being targeted again: churches, synagogues, mosques. Nightclubs, movie theaters, concerts. Walmarts, malls, grocery stores. Medical centers. Corporate Christmas parties. Block parties. Youth sports events. Garlic festivals.
And perhaps, somehow, every private home.
After all, our elected officials have ensured that teenagers nursing grievances, white nationalists seeking ethnic purity, terrorists seeking religious war, sexually frustrated misogynists pursuing revenge, ideologues hunting political enemies and sociopaths seeking adrenaline rushes all have easy, often untraceable access to military-grade weapons.
Under such circumstances, all of America remains a soft target. Not only our schools.
A (densely) armed society is not a polite society, as the saying goes; it is a justifiably paranoid one. It is a society forced to live in a constant state of vigilance and fear, under thick casings of bulletproof glass, in every school, house of worship or home. To be truly safe, perhaps one day every building, baseball diamond and vacant lot will have a single point of entry, guarded by a phalanx of soldiers.
Perhaps that would at last will into existence the dystopian police state that hard-right conservatives have long warned about — indeed, have said their own private arsenals are designed to prevent.
By all means, let’s war-game better strategies for protecting 10-year-olds in their classrooms. Install doors that actually lock, telecommunications systems that work and police officers willing to brave the bad guys to protect the innocent.
But what most needs “hardening” isn’t our schools. It is our politicians’ backbones.
Source: WP
