The lesson of Columbine examined.

April 20, 6:42 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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On another anniversary of Columbine, we might look at various other experiences for perspective and see whether anything was learned at all. In this Examiner’s surmise, the deaths of students are unnecessary, avoidable, and politically motivated.

Politically motivated? How? By indolence and by stubbornness, pure stubbornness. Perhaps tortious interference. Perhaps worse. For some of the details of response after-the-fact, please see Examiner Howard Nemerov’s analysis here. There is a Page 1 and Page 2 there. Please read the other Examiners on this issue listed in the SIDEBAR on the right of this article. >

Quite a statement. My argument is not for more guns; it’s not buying the iron, it’s seeing the irony. The ancient Greeks defined irony as a feigned ignorance. Today, it could be lack of self-awareness. (Stubbornness) It is the pattern and practice that officials will deny adult students, employees and visitors their individual authority to act when facing grave danger, a solution proven to work again and again. This is highly visible to them as easily as it is to 80 million gun owners. 9Politically motivated.) Figures for lives saved by an armed citizen humiliate and impeach all gun control, so officials hide the ball of personal authority purely because the armed citizen is in the public interest. (Tortious interference.) Like all independence, it shows how unneeded officials can be on so many levels. This is a great deal of the lesson of Columbine. And Illinois. And Virginia Tech. Discouraging and punishing citizen authority to act when facing grave danger as policy to keep campuses safe. Irony.

In America, there is the lesson that the armed citizen is more than a right, it is the first safeguard of the nation against bogus policies which bluff or even punish citizens out of their authority. You can see how well an armed citizen might have worked at Columbine. Depending on others to the exclusion of one’s own authority to act is a trap, of course.

Lessons of this type are clear to lovers of Independence. Before there was the right of concealed carry of handguns, there was the right of insisting on carrying our own personal burdens in independence. This has its practical and reasonable limitations, of course, but America has a long way to go before getting back to that sort of reasonable independence from her servants — the real lesson of all of these shootings.

As I point out in my book Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns — "..the idea of disarming the citizen merely to show how violent violence can be is unconscionable." This is how deep officials can sink in using crime itself as a gimmick to usher in more and more seemingly unrelated dependency policies. And they are related. The official position is that this sort of cognizance is extremist, hysterical, even futile, and worthy of suspicion. It is why gun owners say that gun control isn’t about guns, but about control. [Safe Streets includes an analysis of the Virginia Tech Review Panel.]

But the people are the sovereign, no matter what officials might think of you. When reports show an increase in gun sales, it is not because citizens fear confiscations – if they come for any at all, they’ll come for all of them – it is much more the cognizance of anticipated policy changes in how crime is selectively tolerated by officials, how the people are not tolerated by officials, the response times of assets and the funding of assets, choking of the system for completed crimes, and other dynamics which put the citizen more alone and unsupported than ever before. When police could not arrive at all in time and stop EMS from entering – waiting off campus is not arrival on scene – people are afraid that Justice for similarly completed acts of violence will not arrive at all, either.

Do we arm teachers? Do we arm students? Do we wait for the armed police at the curb, and what do we do in the unarmed meantime? In the case of underage students, we affirm the parents’ right to be armed wherever they have a right to be statewide, including campuses. Simple. Visiting parents come and go throughout the school day, and a possible active shooter can never really be sure who is armed and close enough to him/her to stop them before they get started. Publicize this and shooters think twice. Anything else betrays a mistrust of constituents, and that is as inappropriate in a free country as deceiving police into suspecting the electorate.

This time last year, Virginia Tech paid $11 Million in settlement, which purchased for the defendant more time to deny adult students their rights... even through the next time. That next time came when they, again, missed the lesson of Columbine and of their own school shooting experience. What resulted was continued on-campus crime, of course, including the decapitation of a young Asian student which seemed to horrify students less than it should have. Still, nothing was done that could reflect anything learned the way a free people need trustees to learn it. What a disgrace for an institution of higher learning in a public trust. The lesson learned was taken up by other colleges, however, who more than differ, they act, such as Utah’s campuses, and some in Colorado. There, armed students are all over campus. The authority of lethal force is where it belongs: in the hands of the citizen, and some authority only on loan to colleges and trustees.

When police could not arrive at all in time, people are now more afraid that Justice will not arrive at all, either.

So what is the lesson to be learned from Columbine? The lesson from Columbine is that you just can’t get good help anymore, whether they come for your guns, ignore your authority, or pay $11 Million for the privilege of doing same, and it’s time we stopped expecting anything from them. No one can take your place as the first line of defense, and it’s very unlearned for any trustees to propose that trustees or police can. In Columbine, only a handful of heroes and heroines already on-scene acted, we know. Less-than-lethal, but it demonstrates the function of someone already on scene as more effective. Police and EMS did not go in for hours. But truly, if only one adult visiting parent on campus nearby had a gun, loaded and on the hip as a matter of everyday personal preference in a free country, Columbine would never have been the casualty it was. Nor would Virginia Tech, and neither would Illinois. The list goes on, doesn’t it? Affirming armed adult students on campus makes as much sense as teaching citizens CPR and First-aid. Why would any trustee deny CPR to all the students, for instance?

There is a bigger lesson to learn from Columbine in combination with every school shooting before and since: Disarming the target of any shooting is one of the most unconscionable things trustees can do. The armed citizen has been shown consistently to stop an active shooter, and discouraging this is hiding the ball of your authority, not only your right, but your authority to act. Do you need permission from trustees to stop a crime in progress? So much for feigned ignorance. This is what has been learned??

This is what are kids learn from trustees?

Without citizens first understanding and invoking their authority over servants, and the authority to stop a crime in progress as part of that, the lesson of Columbine will be lost on them. As long as it remains a feigned quandary in the minds of some of the people and all of the politicians, the servants own us, and will pay millions for it. And kids will die.

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John Longenecker is author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns.