Thoughts on the Uvalde massacre

The gelling narrative around the Uvalde, Texas massacre is centered on law enforcement's hesitation to confront the shooter. In turn, attention now is squarely on the Uvalde school district's police chief. (If you were surprised to learn the school district has its own police force, join the club.)

However, to focus on one man's purported mistakes is to miss a larger picture.

First, although the shooter got his guns legally, nobody thinks he should have. That's a failing that preceded the massacre and has nothing to do with the law enforcement response.

Second, although the police chief's refusal to act might have allowed some victims to die from lack of access to medical care, by the time the chief made that decision a lot of people were already dead. The delay, if that's what happened, came after the greater part of the killing had already been done.

Making the public narrative — the one playing out in the press and online — all about what the police chief did or didn't do is a disservice to the public. The chief's actions or inaction didn't precipitate the killing. We need to address what did.

As I've processed the limited amount of pro-gun argumentation I can stomach in the wake of the massacre, I've found that pro-gun politicians (who at this point are exclusively Republican) have settled on two concrete ideas:

• Schools should be even better fortified.
• More armed persons, both teachers and school resource officers, should be present within schools.

If what I call the gelling narrative is, in fact, true, it's worth asking why more armed persons would help. If trained police officers weren't up to the task of confronting the shooter, why should we think an armed teacher — whose first job is supposed to be teaching, not police work — would fare any better?

As for better fortifying schools, I have to ask why we think school districts should divert even more money from education to making campuses into modern castles. It's a way of putting up barriers to more shootings, perhaps, but is it the best way?

We need to consider the costs and benefits of any given approach to making schools safer, and we haven't done that when it comes to the idea of fortifying them.

Apparently, one of the mistakes that allowed the shooter to enter the school was that a door was left unlocked. The reason seems to have been that a teacher needed to fetch something (a phone, I believe) from a car. It's easy enough to blame the teacher for that consequential security lapse, and I'm sure many will. Ask yourself, though: how often have you had to leave your office to fetch something you left in your car? How big a pain was it to get back inside? The more trouble it was, the more likely you are to have pondered subverting your own workplace's security measures. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or more, nothing bad would happen.

Now, you might argue that the teacher should have considered that one-in-a-hundred, or one-in-a-million, or one-in-a-zillion chance of something terrible happening, and not subverted school security. But is that how we want everyone at schools to think and to behave?

Do you want your kids to think of school as a deadly, dangerous place?

Maybe you do. But what if other parents don't? What if other parents are concerned about the mental-health toll on kids of treating their places of learning as besieged camps?

Look at the incident from a different perspective. Was it necessary that the shooter be legally allowed to purchase semiautomatic rifles and large magazines at the age of 18? Is that a good public policy, or is it one that the legislature should revisit? What are the public policy interests that are so important, so weighty, that they outweigh even considering whether he should have been allowed to make his purchases?

I mean, we keep people from drinking until they're twenty-one. I'm sure there are some nineteen-year-olds out there who have better judgment than some who are twice their age, Even so, nobody argues that we must let those responsible nineteen-year-olds drink. We have a consensus that younger people, statistically speaking, are more apt to abuse the privilege of consuming alcohol.

Why doesn't that same logic inform ownership or use of semiautomatic rifles and large ammunition magazines? Why do we allow the exceptions to the rule to govern in that case?

I know, I know — it's because of the almighty Second Amendment. Well, I've already explained why that's a lazy, thoughtless reason.