In the wake of Audrey Hale’s murderous spree, we are hearing the familiar calls for more gun control legislation. Left unexplained is how adding one more to the hundreds of gun control statutes and regulations that already exist will magically stop murders (or some categories of murders) from taking place.
As usual, the default left-wing policy is a ban on “assault weapons.” Never mind that such a ban was implemented for a decade, and it did no good. In this particular case, was any of the three weapons carried by Audrey Hale an “assault weapon,” as defined in the 1990s legislation or by any other definition? I don’t know. Press accounts mostly describe two of her guns as AR-15s, but I don’t think that is accurate. The officers who killed Audrey Hale, on the other hand, did use AR-15s, at least that is how it looked to me. Do liberals want to ban law enforcement from protecting the rest of us with these weapons? I believe they do.
In any event, what is it, exactly, that liberals want to ban? Senator John Kennedy asked this question of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is having a very bad week:
Yesterday, Sen. @JohnKennedyLA asked Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas if he could give the definition of assault weapons he wants to ban. He couldn't give a definition.@JohnKennedyLA asked Mayorkas again today, and he still couldn't. pic.twitter.com/Nfic7kj6CB
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 29, 2023
Liberals like Mayorkas apparently see no irony in their firm belief that something they can’t identify should be banned.
The reality is that school shooting incidents like Audrey Hale’s are a hard problem to solve, for two reasons. First, they are extremely rare. There are something like 130,000 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S. While violence sometimes takes place in or around schools, often gang-related, “school shooting” incidents like Audrey Hale’s occur roughly once a year. So the odds against a particular school being victimized are very long.
The other factor that makes prevention difficult is that mass shooters, unlike more conventional types of murderers (who, of course, commit vastly more murders) usually don’t have much of a criminal history, if any. They are mentally disturbed, but there are millions of mentally disturbed people in the U.S., virtually none of whom are institutionalized under current policies. Only an infinitesimal proportion of those disturbed people become mass shooters. So how do we identify the potential mass murderers in advance, and somehow neutralize them? The reality is that we generally can’t identify them (although if someone posts on Facebook “I am going to be a school shooter,” as the Parkland murderer did, it would seem to be a pretty good clue).
Our usual approach to crime is to try to deter it. Don’t rob a bank, or you likely will go to prison. But mass shooters, like Audrey Hale, typically expect to die. So it is more or less impossible to deter them.
Given those factors, if you run a school, there are two realistic options. The first is to count on the law of averages. The risk of your school being targeted by a mass shooter is extremely small. This is the approach that a great many schools follow successfully. The alternative is to provide meaningful security. This takes the form of school safety officers and in some cases, encouraging qualified teachers and administrators to be armed. It is unfortunate that the same liberals who want to ban more or less random categories of firearms simultaneously campaign to get rid of school safety officers, thereby rendering schools defenseless.
The current debate over gun control is unlikely to be any more fruitful than the last 15 or 20 rounds have been. But it will be fodder for left-wing demagoguery, which I suppose is the real point.
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