Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Politicians on the Left say we need stricter gun laws.
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” Beto O’Rourke said in announcing his plans if he’s elected Texas governor later this year.
Politicians on the Right want to arm teachers and fill our schools with armed guards.
“Gun control is not the answer,” Republican Party of New Mexico Chairman Steve Pearce said after Tuesday’s shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school in which 19 children and two teachers were shot to death by a teenager.
What we know for sure is we live in a nation deeply divided, and we need to adopt the best ideas from both political extremes if we hope to reduce the number of mass murders.
We achieve that goal in dozens of different ways, without deference to either political agenda:
• First, we have to be responsible for each other. Students in Melrose on Wednesday offered a good example of how to do that.
When an eighth-grader told a classmate he had a gun in his backpack and planned to “shoot up the school,” students immediately relayed the information to a principal who notified a sheriff’s deputy who was already in the building for a routine security check.
The student didn’t have a gun on campus so it’s likely there was no immediate threat. But while we will never know how many times the “see something, say something” approach might prevent violence, it seems a logical and responsible response to the possibility.
• We can’t have too many well-trained, responsible people with guns among us. Emphasis on the well-trained and responsible, please.
Yes, it’s a Republican talking point. But it’s also common sense, especially in rural areas where law enforcement may be miles away.
We know most area schools already have armed employees whose purpose is to prevent shootings like those that have occurred at Columbine and now in Uvalde. While we pray they never have to use those weapons, we also need to spend more than a little time ensuring their training goes beyond target practice at the local range.
It’s one thing to boast “I’ve been shooting rabbits since I was 5;” it’s another to have the training necessary to shoot at someone who’s shooting at you, without inflicting collateral damage.
• We also need a greater understanding of who is likely to commit violence and we need to take action to make it difficult for those people to access weapons. Teenage boys, those with a history of mental illness and those with violent criminal records should maybe not have much freedom to legally purchase guns.
Yes, it’s a Democratic talking point and it’s complicated. But epidemiologists might help us prevent gun violence if we let them.
“There is a clear gap in knowledge relating to firearm violence due to a failure to collect and make data available and sometimes due to direct efforts to thwart research into firearm injury prevention,” the International Journal of Epidemiology reports on its website.
We can’t get rid of the more than 300 million guns already in the U.S. The solution to reducing mass murder and violence in general is a kinder, more caring population that we have to nurture every day with those closest to us.
Politicians can help, but only if they work together to implement the best ideas from logical voices that silence the extremes.
— David Stevens
Publisher