School Shootings Can be Stopped

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Yesterday at 5:32 a.m. I was awakened by a text to my phone. It was our Superintendent of Schools, alerting all School Board members of a threatened school shooting that day at not one but two of our high schools. She’d been awakened at 3:30 a.m. and had started the planned, approved response, and now she felt it was time to bring us in. I let her know I’d be ready if I could help in any way, and then I went about my business with full faith in our administrative leaders and the Green Bay Police Department.

Late in the morning I sat down in front of the TV with a cup of coffee, and there, on national news, was a report on a school shooting in Wisconsin! But it wasn’t Green Bay. It was Madison, and there were dead bodies and  briefings by police and emergency vehicles – in Wisconsin! So close to home! I checked my phone and found a blessed follow-up from the superintendent: The threat has been determined not credible; we’re preparing a message to staff. Thank God! Likely no massacre in a Green Bay school today.

But I fear the day will come. Our country has had 323 school shootings in 349 days this year, says the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. According to several press sources, we’ve had 488 mass shootings across the US so far in 2024. Deaths from gunshot, both homicide and suicide, are up 8% in the past four years. Here in the US, we have 120 guns for every 100 people. In fact, we have more than twice as many guns as the next-highest country, Yemen. Beyond that, no country on earth has even 1/3 as many guns as we have here in the good old US of A, home to less than 5% of the world’s population but 42% of its guns.

Oh, I knew all this before the Madison school shooting, before the early-morning threat in Green Bay, and I’ve written about it at length. But we had a School Board meeting last evening, and so I had a chance to quietly tell a smart friend that I know the solution: I know how to end the school shootings and the mass shootings and the suicides-by-gun and all these gun deaths. I shared some of those shocking statistics with him and then laid out my plan. He said, “It can’t be done.”

I’ve heard that before, and my response is, “Then nothing can be done.” On the other hand, I believe that any problem can be solved if people embrace the solution and commit to a plan and see it through. To his point, though, I don’t believe anything will be done.

I’ve written four articles on this subject over two years, patiently explaining the actual and intended meaning of the Second Amendment and consistently offering the one solution I absolutely know will work. Do I believe anyone will ever agree with me and commit to solving the problem? Not likely in my lifetime – perhaps never. But why don’t you have a read and see what you think: