School shootings due to lack of security

By Gary DeVon • October 18, 2015 7:00 am

Dear Editor,

I believe that the lack of security is the problem when it comes to school shootings. I think that after the Columbine shooting in Denver in 1999, 16 years ago, would have woken up all other schools in America with better security policies, Common Sense. I would like the superintendants to check into a security systems like they have at the ball games, like the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Pac 10 Basketball and College Football, even the PGA… I have not heard of any shootings at any of these events. Seriously, start upgrading the security systems in the schools. Start there first, because after all your public institution should be liable for security and the well being of who is enrolled there and works there.

Here are just some of the other statistics of deaths. Got these statistics online:

Annual United States Road Crash Statistics

  • Over 37,000 people die in road crashes each year
  • An additional 2.35 million are injured or disabled
  • Over 1,600 children under 15 years of age die each year
  • Nearly 8,000 people are killed in crashes involving drivers age 16-20

Gun control supporters have been pedal-to-the-metal on the subject over time. The Violence Policy Center compared gun-related and vehicle accident deaths in 2011. Michael Bloomberg’s news machine did so in 2012. Mother Jones, the publication once edited by Michael Moore, if that tells you anything, did so in 2013. Last year, the Center for American Progress asserted that “gun deaths are on track to surpass motor vehicle traffic deaths for [people under age 25].” And this year, the ideologically comparable Atlantic repeated that assertion in a hit piece that referred to guns as “America’s Top Killing Machine.”

AWR Hawkins reports, “[t]he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) final report on death statistics for 2013 shows there were 35,369 deaths from motor vehicle accidents versus 505 deaths from the accidental discharge of firearms. . . . Americans are 70 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than by the accidental discharge of a firearm.”

Just as lacking in resonance is the anti-gunners’ theory that government regulation reduced deaths involving vehicles, so the same ought to be true for those involving firearms. From 1981 through 2013 (the first and last year of data reported by the federal government), deaths due to accidents involving “unregulated” firearms decreased 73 percent, while those due to accidents involving highly-regulated motor vehicles decreased only 31 percent. And, two-thirds of the decline in motor vehicle accident deaths has occurred during the last six years, a half-century after Congress imposed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, authorizing the federal government to dictate how cars should be manufactured and roads should be constructed.

What’s really resonating with the American people, is that gun control supporters—are wrong about handguns, wrong about the Second Amendment, wrong about Right-to-Carry, wrong about semi-automatic rifles, wrong about ammunition magazines, wrong about ammunition, and the list goes on-they aren’t hitting on all cylinders.

The only way that the number of gun-related deaths compares to the number of vehicle accident deaths, is if vehicle accident deaths are compared to the grand total of suicides, murders, defensive homicides by private citizens, legal intervention homicides by law enforcement officers, and the relatively smaller number of firearm accident deaths. And that math is as slippery as a garage floor mopped with 10W-30.

One last tid bit that Gun Control Supporters forget about is, in the USA, where nearly half of pregnancies are unintended and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion [1], there are over 3,000 abortions per day. Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies in the USA (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. There where no guns involved here.

All injury deaths

• Number of deaths: 192,945

• Deaths per 100,000 population: 60.2

All poisoning deaths

• Number of deaths: 48,545

• Deaths per 100,000 population: 15.4

Motor vehicle traffic deaths

• Number of deaths: 33,804

• Deaths per 100,000 population: 10.7

All firearm deaths

• Number of deaths: 33,636

• Deaths per 100,000 population: 10.6

Mortality: Drug poisoning deaths

• Deaths per 100,000 population: 13.9 (2013)

I believe that, if they don’t put in better security systems in the schools they need to be closed. I’m sure there is already codes out there that the legislatures have passed and these public schools could be fined for not complying with a safe and secure environment for our children and the people that work there, after all they are public institutions that are regulated by government.

Debbie Lorz

Tonasket