After Covenant School Shooting, Gun Control Is Still Just Aiming At The Wrong Target

School Safety Is The Problem. Why Not Just Make Schools Safe?

Sadly, The Covenant School Shooting is following what has become an all-too-familiar narrative arc:

A person with evil intent walks virtually unopposed into a school and commences to open fire on defenseless children and teachers. The shooter, Audrey Hale, simply shot out a glass door and walked into the school.

This was an evil act. This was a barbaric act. This was an act without justification or reason. Let us not delude ourselves by thinking otherwise.

But this was also a preventable act. Any time a person walks into a school unopposed or unobstructed, that is a failure of planning, a failure of preparation, a failure perhaps of infrastructure, but in all cases it is a failure. Schools do not need to be the soft targets they are, and schools should not be the soft targets they are.

Security camera footage shows clearly how little effort the shooter needed to get into the school. A few seconds and she was inside, with no one prepared to oppose, no one in place to resist, and certainly no one in place to shoot back.

Metro Nashville PD @MNPDNashville

Active shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale drove to Covenant Church/School in her Honda Fit this morning, parked, and shot her way into the building. She was armed with 2 assault-type guns and a 9 millimeter pistol.

This is not an issue about gun control. Banning “assault rifles” would not have prevented this evil and barbaric act. Gun bans would not have even slowed her down.

It is bad enough that the “solutions” being touted by the sickening and disgusting Democrats, who revel in the deaths of children merely to launch yet another assault on the Constitution that is as yet the supreme law of the United States, are simply illegal, illegitimate, and wholly void of any legal substance.

Their proposals to “ban assault weapons” are something far worse and far more appalling in light of this latest tragedy—they are completely useless.

We would do well to remember that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, also known as the “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act”, had been written into law as part of the 1994 "Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994” (PL 103-322)¹. The very weapons that some would ban now were already banned at the time of the Columbine shooting in 1999. That weapons ban failed miserably at Columbine. That weapons ban did not merely work badly, it did not work at all.

Yet why would we expect any law to work well when that law flies in the face of the US Constitution? The text of the Second Amendment is clear, simple, unequivocal, and categorical:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Even a simple grammatical analysis of that text yields but one unalterable conclusion. Government may not restrict the right to keep and bear arms, period. There are no exceptions. There are no exigent circumstances. There are no excuses.

The Right To Keep And Bear Arms Must Never Be Infringed

The government is precluded from enacting gun control. There are no second options to consider.

From Columbine, through Parkland, through Uvalde, and now through the Covenant School, we see tragic reasons why government does not get to have this authority: government cannot wield this authority to any good effect. When it comes to gun safety, government is simply not competent to make it happen.

For this reason alone, even before we get to questions of tyrannical and unjust government, responding to mass shootings by seeking to ban various classes of firearms is always the wrong-footed approach. That approach asks the wrong question and thus cannot hope to offer anything but a wrong solution—a solution that not only violates fundamental rights of self-preservation but also basic parameters of common sense.

On Gun Control, We Keep Asking The Wrong Question

Thus for the White House to claim that the victims at The Covenant School are owed a violation of the Constitution is arrant and frankly sickening nonsense.

President Joe Biden addressed Nashville's deadly school shooting while speaking at an event in Durham, North Carolina, Tuesday, reiterating his call for Congress to pass an assault weapons ban and saying there was a "moral price to pay for inaction."

"As a nation we owe these families more than our prayers," Biden said of the families of the six people who were killed Monday when a 28-year-old former student opened fire at the Covenant School in Nashville. "We owe them action."

Americans, and especially our children are indeed owed action. There should be action—action which is Constitutional, action which is lawful, action which is above all else effective. That disqualifies any ban on assault weapons from even a moment’s consideration, as they are neither Constitutional, lawful, nor effective. That disqualifies any attempt by government at any level to control and regulate firearms, as government is not competent to do so.

If government is not competent to control firearms—and government is most emphatically not competent to do so, on any level—what questions should we be asking? What actions should we be demanding?

What can we reasonably expect government to do?

The answer now, as before, is to improve schools to make them safer buildings, safer campuses.

The Parkland Shooting: Failure By Design

In his classic treatise on strategy and tactics, Sun Tzu wrote "You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked." This is the goal of all security: invulnerability to attack. It should be the goal of school security--and it has not been.

Making schools invulnerable should be the one constant objective in every school district.

That means having tighter controls over the points of access. The shooter at the Covenant School was able to shoot the glass out of a door to gain entrance. The Uvalde shooter simply walked in the door, as did the shooter at Parkland in 2018. These things should never be allowed to happen. These things should be made impossible.

Not allowing school shootings means having a solid man-trap at the doors where entrance is permitted.

Mantraps limit access to secure areas within a facility while providing an effective means to physically detain unauthorized persons until security provides clearance. In its most basic form, a mantrap is comprised of a set of doors that requires the person to enter the first while the others are closed. Mantraps are typically manual swing doors forming a vestibule but can also use sliding doors or gates. Some mantraps use turnstiles or revolving doors.

Once inside the first door, the person cannot pass through the second door until the first door is closed.

Not allowing school shootings means having security personnel vetting each and every non-student who walks through the door.

Not allowing school shootings means having containment doors—essentially expansions on the man-trap premise—within the building to restrict access to the entire school.

In large scale systems such as those found in casinos, healthcare facilities, government installations and large financial institutions, as many as 99 doors can be configured into a single massive mantrap system. The programmable nature of such large systems provides system designers and integrators with the flexibility to implement complex systems involving dozens of rooms and safe areas.

These are simple, physical, and above all Constitutional approaches to resolving the issue of school shootings.

Yet the “experts” will tell us—and have told us—that these are bad ideas and should not be considered.

Ken Trump, president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services, believes metal detectors are an unsustainable, knee-jerk political reaction. He cautions against their use for practical reasons like cost, and because they are often seen as a replacement for better strategies.

Trump has been a school safety consultant for 30 years and Congress has invited him to testify on the topic four times since 1999. He also provided testimony to the task force that was formed after the Sandy Hook shooting and frequently appears as an expert on national news programs.

The problem with physical safety, you see, is that Ken Trump and his ilk think such measures are “too hard”—yes, he really believes that.

In order to do the job, a metal detector would have to be coupled with other measures that simply are not realistic. First and foremost, they must be in use around the clock, 365 days a year, to prevent someone from stashing a weapon, Trump said. All ground-floor windows need to remain permanently shut so no one can pass anything into the building. No one can prop open a door, even temporarily, and every entrance and exit would need to be manned.

How did the Uvalde shooter gain access to the school? Through a door that was propped open and then didn’t lock properly when the teacher hastily tried to close it. So yeah, propping doors open is a security risk—but the inconvenience of having to adapt to controlled modes of access is simply too much to ask of both students and their parents.

You cannot enter a courthouse without going through a metal detector. You cannot enter a concert venue without going through a metal detector. You cannot board a plane without going through at least a metal detector. Yet we are told it is simply unrealistic to expect students to go through a metal detector at school. It is simply unrealistic to tell teachers not to prop open doors. It is simply unrealistic to have doors constructed so that a few rounds of ammunition will not suffice to defeat a locking mechanism.

From Columbine through Parkland through Uvalde down to The Covenant School, teachers and children have been shot and killed because it’s “unrealistic” to expect teachers not to prop open a door, or for parents to have to check in with the security desk to visit their children during the school day.

This is the logic of the “experts”, and has been the logic of the “experts” for decades. Because of this logic and their “expertise”, very few schools have ever had effective security measures implemented. Because of this logic and their “expertise”, those in government look away from the things they can legally do—and which they are ethically obligated to do—and look instead towards the things they cannot legally do, and which have already been proven to simply not work at all.

Is it really too much to ask that, for once, politicians and activists quit aiming at the wrong target when confronted with the horror of yet another school shooting? Is it really too much to ask that, instead of seeking new and creative ways to subvert the Constitution, we instead seek ways to make schools better protected, so that people with evil intent cannot get into the school at all?

I don’t pretend to know what the best mix of security measures would be, but this much I do know: If Audrey Hale was denied entrance to the school, if Salvatore Ramos was denied entry in Uvalde, if Nikolas Cruz was denied entry at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, it would not have mattered what weapons they carried. Without entry into the school not one child would have died in any of those situations.

Just this once, let’s aim at the right target—school safety. If we can make courthouses safe, if we can make concert venues safe, if we can make planes safe, surely we can make schools safe as well, and without violating the Constitution to do so.

1. “H.R. 3355 — 103rd Congress: Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.” www.GovTrack.us. 1993. <https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/103/hr3355>