In an ideal world, people wouldn’t do terrible things to each other, especially to children.
But we don’t live in an ideal world, and we have to deal with reality.
The reality is that people do terrible things to each other. Not all people, thankfully, but it doesn’t take many to have a big negative impact on the world.
And here’s the thing about people who do terrible things: the issue isn’t that they are able to get their hands on weapons (Realistically, anything can be used as a weapon. Literally anything.).
The problem is that there are people who have the intention to do evil things. Without evil intention, they don’t take evil actions.
The importance of intention is worth noting on the other side of the school shooting issue. We can arm people who don’t have enough intention, enough will to defend children, and those people won’t take the actions necessary to protect children.
With intention, though, even an unarmed person can, sometimes, make a difference which we saw in a recent situation in Oklahoma. Spencer Humphrey and Kari King write,
New video shows a principal tackling a gunman inside an Oklahoma high school after the former student opened fire April 7.
Court documents obtained by Nexstar’s KFOR say the suspect in the Pauls Valley High School shooting studied the 1999 Columbine school shooting and tried to target multiple students before shooting and wounding Principal Kirk Moore during the scuffle.
I’m thankful that someone (the principal, in this case) was on campus with the courage to do something to stop this situation from becoming worse.
Now, some will read this and say, “See! You don’t need guns at schools to protect children! You just need intention!”
But that’s a shallow and misleading interpretation of the situation because it doesn’t ask how many shootings would be prevented by having guns in the hands of officials on campus (mass shooters target gun-free zones for a reason), and it doesn’t ask how many lives would be saved by stopping a shooter sooner.
In this case, the principal was lucky. The principal was injured but not killed. I’m thankful that he wasn’t killed.
But would the principal have been injured at all if he had been able to shoot back at the attacker from a distance?
And how many school shootings could be prevented from becoming mass shootings if there was someone on campus able to stop the threat from a distance?
Don’t let this principal’s good luck be used as a justification for continuing to keep children vulnerable to attacks by would-be school shooters.