Special Report: Spare Us the ‘Conversation’

The American Spectator 

Let the Kimmels and Colberts say what they want about those musty old schools, with their “silly” morning prayers, codes of discipline, and starchy moral lessons. At least those schools weren’t scene of mass shootings. The teachers in those days didn’t preach gun control but self-control. Now their successors preach the reverse and wake up to dead colleagues and pupils.

"The pols and pundits most insistent upon holding a gun-control “conversation” in the wake of mass shootings at schools did the most to turn them into nihilistic wastelands. From the puffed-chest phonies on CNN and MSNBC, we hear a lot about sinister “lobbies” that intimidate passive, cowardly pols. The insufferable Chris Cuomo, whose partisan arrogance is impossible to overstate, rips into this or that Republican for not “standing up” to the NRA. When has Cuomo ever stood up to the morally bankrupt teachers’ unions that turned America’s public schools into assembly lines of pathology?

"Cuomo, full of cheap outrage, seized upon Trump’s blameless tweets about the shooting. He pronounced them “stupid.” It is not clear what Trump could possibly have said to satisfy Cuomo. Was he expecting Trump to call for the confiscation of all guns? The imposition of martial law?

"The liberal elite’s hoped-for “conversation” about guns would never proceed like one. They are not looking for a dialogue but an occasion to diatribe without ever having to answer for their own role in the demise of civil society.

"The rise of school shootings is due not to the absence of laws but to the absence of a civilized culture that taught students to follow them. Few lobbies have contributed more to that crisis than the liberal elite’s cherished one, the teachers’ unions. They overflow with self-interested hacks whose pensions fattened as schools disintegrated. Before these educrats laid waste to them, public schools didn’t need” gun-free zones” and little armies to protect them. Teachers took the shaping of minds and souls seriously. But all that discipline and rigor vanished under the ridicule of a ruling class that now treats the debased condition of schools so solemnly. How, they gasp, did a student from an “alternative school” (it is still not clear what that means) invade the school’s “gun-free zone” and wipe out 17 people?" . . . Full article.

From Hot Air: Why Didn’t Democrats Pass Gun Control When They Controlled Congress In Obama’s First Term? . . . "Issue two: Gun control. David French lamented this morning on Twitter that it’s impossible to have a useful conversation about mass shootings until the left believes that the right wants to stop mass shootings too. But I tweeted back at him that that’s impossible; their worldview rests on the belief that the right operates in bad faith in all things. " . . .

It seems to me that we can’t even begin to have a meaningful public discussion about dealing with the contagion of mass shootings absent agreeement that Second Amendment supporters want to stop mass shootings too.