First of all it wasn't an AR-15 that killed 17 people and wounded 14 more at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last Wednesday, it was 19-year old Nicholas Cruz who killed those students and faculty members.
Like other mass shootings, the gun control nuts come out of the woodwork and blame the gun and not the person pulling the trigger.
I've listened to radio and television commentators and read several newspaper articles and there seems to be a theme that we need to ban assault weapons or assault rifles. I've yet to get a clear explanation or meaning on exactly what an assault weapon is. The AR in the AR-15 doesn't stand for Assault Rifle, it stands for ArmaLite after the company that developed the rifle in the 1950s.
The reason the AR-15 gets a bad wrap from gun control advocates is it looks bad. It looks like something out of the movies with its only purpose to kill people.
Looks are deceiving. I don't own an AR-15 but I do own a .223-caliber rifle. Granted my rifle is a single-shot I won as a door prize and put a scope on it for my children to hunt with.
But the AR-15 shoots the same caliber bullet. There are .223-caliber semi-automatic rifles that look exactly like the guns you see on these outdoor hunting shows. They can be purchased with multiple clips, holding many rounds of ammunition – they just don't look like an 'assault rifle'.
I've seen shotguns that have clips that can be easily exchanged to reload. But it's the AR-15 that gets the blame because it's apparently the weapon of choice in some of the worst shootings in this nation, including Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., where 27 people were killed.
Don't blame the gun. Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Any attempt to take firearms away from people won't stop events like we witnessed last week. If someone wants to get a gun and go shoot up a school, movie theater or any other gathering, they'll get a gun.
I see where Gov. Kay Ivey and U.S. Sen. Doug Jones are advocating metal detectors at all public schools. That sounds politically correct, but it won't stop school shootings it will only disrupt the school day.
If Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had metal detectors, Cruz would have simply set off a metal detector alarm before he started firing. Or he could have waited until the school bell rang and the parking lot was full of students before he opened fire.
U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne has joined President Trump in casting blame on the FBI since the FBI had received a tip that Cruz had talked about attacking a school but didn't follow up on the tip.
From what I read, there were a lot of signals that Cruz was on the crazy side. But we have this thing called the U.S. Constitution that prevents the government from locking up everybody that acts a little strange. Even if the FBI had responded to the Cruz concerns, there was very little they could have done.
I do agree with President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions that mental health was the root of the shooting, not necessarily the guns. But states continue to cut funding for mental health evaluations.
While I agree mental health is a serious issue, I still say the lack of funding and resources in our juvenile justice system is where the real problem lies.
I was proud to see the Alabama Legislature is considering an overhaul of the juvenile justice system this session. I haven't read the bill, but I understand the bill's intent is to do more intervention to prevent small juvenile crimes from becoming major felonies. I like the concept.
I've written it here before, but it's like the old oil filter commercial that said 'pay me now or pay me later'. The concept was to pay the $3 or $4 to change the oil filter instead of paying $5,000 to $6,000 to replace the engine.
Of the many juvenile judges I've talked to over the years, it usually starts with truancy from school and begins escalating from there. In my opinion, the current system simply calls for slapping them on the wrist and telling them not to do it again. When juveniles start vandalizing and breaking into homes and cars we are often forced to send them back to the home where they came from because we don't have the resources to intervene and stop potential violent behavior down the road. Then we want to point fingers when that juvenile or young adult opens fire on a school when there's been a paper trail a mile long that he or she was headed down the wrong path.
I don't have the answer, but I do recall what happened at Tuscaloosa Jr. High School when I was there. Depending on what you did, you got sentenced to 'Saturday School'. Some got sentenced to two or three Saturdays. I got sentenced to one for sticking gum under my desk. I spent an entire Saturday with a putty knife scraping gum from underneath every desk in the school. I didn't want to go back and I never stuck a piece of gum under a desk again.
That may sound trivial to you, but we had real consequences for our actions. If we don't start reaching out to our young people and stop their misdemeanor actions before they turn into felonies, we are fighting a losing battle.
Is some type of boot camp where we need to go? I don't know, but I bet it would turn some lives around before they got out of hand. We want to pay money to put cops in the schools, possibly put up metal detectors and who knows what to turn our schools into some type of prison atmosphere when those things don't get to the root of the problem of disturbed children who lash out with violence.
Gun control is not the solution, people control is the only solution.
