After Parkland, New Hampshire created a School Safety Taskforce. Its job was to meet, discuss, and make recommendations on improving safety or reducing the chance of an active shooter event. They came up with 59 suggestions but left out the one they needed.
The problem informs the solution. You can’t account for every nutjob. No matter how many programs the “government” or community funds or creates, you will miss something. Parkland – the inspiration for this task force – was a perfect example. That shooter was on the radar for years. Almost everyone who needed to know about the risk knew his name, talked to him, and he still managed to get firearms and shoot up the school because of the government.
In the aftermath, the Parkland Commission came up with many ideas, but one of them was to arm teachers and staff.
Not in New Hampshire.
To be fair, some of the suggestions from the NH task force are reasonable, but many of them are left-wing Edu-industrial-complex crap. And even more of them are budget-busting excess. All of which brings me to the solution informed by the problem.
The problem is that schools are soft-targets and everyone, including the so-called mental-health problem child, knows it. Schools with locked doors you can only open from inside or with a key or ID are also not without flaws, and Uvalde is proof of that. So, the solution is to make them hard targets.
Nowhere among the fifty-nine recommendations could I find the words arm and train staff.
Add or increase armed security and then tell everyone about it.
Everyone.
You don’t need armies of counselors or social-emotional learning. Yes, you need emergency response plans with contingencies for different sorts of emergencies. That makes sense, especially in today’s climate with institutions like public schools brain-raping grade-schoolers with their political and gender BS.
The progressive culture has destroyed families, pilloried fathers, and left kids in listless and unstable situations at home.
And little if anything about modern public education seems to help kids find a focus in academics. Some direction.
Girls used to be able to find an outlet in sports (thanks to Title IX) but now boys can be girls leaving biological girls in an increasingly awkward and perilously uncomfortable situation from which there is no escape.
Boys’ sports are equally upturned as heterosexuals are expected to feel comfortable in a shower with guys who are gay. It’s not bigoted for that to feel strange any more than it would be for the vaginas to be concerned about the penis in the girl’s shower or vice versa. Human nature is not a sin, while refusing to admit it exists might be.
So, we’ve got schools’ wrecking kids’ heads, creating a monster from whom they will then protect us with a list of things, none of which includes making the school the worst possible place to be an active shooter.
One recommendation did suggest having local police on-site more often. There to do paperwork and chat with kids at lunch. And that’s not a bad idea, but wouldn’t it be better if they checked in with whoever was in charge of ongoing training and development of armed concealed-carry staff? Make sure the paperwork is up to date. Range practice days and safety and proficiency courses completed.
Most cops would benefit from that themselves, so maybe you also get officers who are better prepared as well. You know, the sort that charges toward the sound of gunfire, intent on ending the incident as quickly as possible. The opposite of that happened at Parkland and Uvalde.
And who among us thinks that an unarmed teacher who would put their body between a shooter and students is a better deterrent than one that is armed and trained to dispatch the threat before they even get near her students. You’d have to be an idiot to think that the former is better than the latter.
So, no lessons learned and fifty-nine recommendations that, with few exceptions, look a lot like what continues to fail.
Thanks for nothing. Sorry, that is not true. These suggestions will cost taxpayers a lot for next to nothing, so that’s something.
One final note: The task force claims that with only 90-days to come up with recommendations, several (like arming staff?) were determined to be too contentious due to differences in opinion among those chosen to craft the suggestions. Not enough time to debate them, or maybe no point? Governor Sununu created this committee. It seems to me that would then be his fault, given that he’s supposed to be a pro-gun governor.