Lorie Shaull from St Paul, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that a daily feature of the keeper’s life is watching the flow of students to and from the high school just across the street; and he notes that part of that view is the two crossing-guards at the traffic light, indicating the meaningful response taken long ago to protect students from the threat of a vehicle-obsessed society.
On a day when there is yet another school shooting—three dead, eight wounded, the keeper watches the students—each carrying a backpack, as they head for the school, protected by the crossing guards but totally vulnerable to the potential of a misguided classmate or psychotic outsider with a gun.
Today there will be 20 or so pedestrians killed in traffic deaths, some of them likely students, maybe even at “guarded” crossings by distracted drivers; there will also be a hundred or so people killed by guns, and the stats will show that the next school shooting is only a matter of time.
Traffic deaths are under constant study in efforts to reduce the toll; study of the gun deaths is prohibited under the terms of a 1996 NRA-lobbied law that prohibits the CDC from researching anything having to do with gun deaths.
Preserving gun ignorance in a culture that fosters vaccine resistance to a deadly pandemic is not surprising, and the keeper readily admits he is not smart enough to devise an effective gun “crossing guard” system.
But a law that prevents even serious thought about gun deaths puts the political bar about as low as it can get.
