Anthropomorphizing the inanimate

I hate to say this, but it is impossible to "stop school shootings".  The progressives' dream - eliminating all guns - will never happen in the US - and the hate-driven, panic-spouting progressives know it.  Hence, it is progressives who do not want to face reality and implement realistic measures to protect students.

We can reduce the number of in-school incidents committed with weapons such as guns and knives.  But the first step is to stop memorializing past incidents in an obviously politically-motivated attempt to drum up blind anger merely to "do something".

If we're going to "do something", then let's spend time analyzing previous shootings, determine exactly what could have been done to prevent those previous shootings, and use that analysis to drive policy in a realistic manner.

And if we look at previous shootings, we already know that there are some common factors that stare us right in the face.  I don't need to review them here.

When we're ready - really ready - to do something about school shootings, it is those common factors that will lead us to the first steps we should take.

Let's not blame an inanimate object for its misuse by a human being.  That way lies tyranny.  We've been there before.  Let's not go there again.

Please.

Because blaming the first inanimate object for its misuse will lead to blaming the next inanimate object for its misuse.  And then the next.  And the next.  It's human nature: when we can blame something or someone else instead of ourselves... we do.

One of my favorite movies is the 1960 production of "Inherit the Wind" (Spencer Tracy, Frederick March, screenplay by Young and Smith, from a play by Lawrence and Lee), a fictionalized dramatization of the Scopes "Monkey Trial".  During a scene in that movie, Tracy (playing Henry Drummond, the defense attorney), has been questioning March (playing Brady, a religious zealot) about the law that forbids teaching evolution in public schools.

This short excerpt says EVERYTHING about religious zealotry in the public arena, whether that religious belief is about religion itself, or "manmade climate change", or gay rights, or... gun rights:

==

(Emphasis mine.)

Henry Drummond: I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy, you can only punish. And I warn you, that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys every one it touches. Its upholders as well as its defiers.

Judge: Colonel Drummond...

Henry Drummond: Can't you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we'll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!