On February 14th at about 2:00 p.m., an armed 19-year-old exited an Uber vehicle at his former school in Parkland, Florida. You know what happened next. It’s been the most talked about, politicized, and dissected news story ever since…
As I made my commute into work that night, my phone rang. On the other end of the line was a producer over at Fox News with whom I worked in the past. Knowing I was a former school resource officer, they wanted my take on the latest mass murder to occur on a high school campus in this troubled nation of ours. I had to decline going on-air, as I was due to be on patrol 30 minutes later—but that didn’t stop me from spending a good portion of that night’s shift thinking practically and philosophically about what I would have said about this latest incident of a typical school day turned bloodbath in the country that I love.
In the wake of Parkland, all I’ve really learned is that the most vocal people only want to hear their own solutions. It’s going to take a man much smarter than myself to come up with a real fix—because I don’t see one. Perhaps it’s best that I didn’t get to go before a large audience and pretend to be some kind of expert who knows how to stop sick and evil people from killing others. There are already too many windbags bouncing rigid ideologies off one another in that realm, if you ask me.
We’ll all go on with our lives while the families of the victims will be scarred horribly for a lifetime.
While I can understand the criticism of the “thoughts and prayers” social media virtue signaling that goes on every time a monster enters a school and goes hunting, to the chagrin of many, I’d give my thoughts and prayers anyway. They’re not going to prevent the next Parkland, but they do matter.
I’m neither deeply religious nor in any way personally connected to a single victim of this heinous event, but I am a father of school children and someone who has had to knock on the door of a stranger to tell them that the person they love most in the world is gone forever. We’ll all go on with our lives while the families of the victims will be scarred horribly for a lifetime. This is the cold and pragmatic nature of humanity. It’s neither right nor wrong, it just is.
Prior to becoming a police officer, I had no idea how to load, unload, make safe, handle, or fire a gun. Three handguns, one shotgun, a rifle, and seven years on the job later, I still wouldn’t consider myself a firearms enthusiast. I don’t belong to the NRA and I’d much rather spend my time training my body to be a weapon over training my hands and eyes to fire a gun. My AR-15 is not a phallic symbol of overcompensation for an underwhelming sense of manhood, it’s a tool that I’m ready to use if I need to—though I hope I never have to.
Still, they’ve replaced the “liberty” in “Give me liberty or give me death!” with “gun control.”
Most of the NRA witch hunters out there are decent everyday folks who simply want the killing to stop, but anti-gun legislation and a scrapping of the 2nd Amendment is the only solution they’ll ever accept. It’s been conditioned into them like Pavlovian dogs by the news media they watch, Democrat party they vote for, and liberal universities they attend to the point that they begin to salivate for that anti-gun steak dangling in front of them anytime a sick white boy opens fire on a crowd of his peers. Meanwhile, they ignore the gun violence in Any City, USA because the illegality of the firearms used doesn’t fit the narrative that outlawing metal and polymer can prevent deaths. Still, they’ve replaced the “liberty” in “Give me liberty or give me death!” with “gun control.”
The truth is this. I’d love to live in a world where there were no guns. They make killing more efficient and less personal—but they also allow a woman to defend herself from a bigger and stronger male attacker, they allow my wife to protect our kids while I’m away at work, they allow everyday Americans to guard against a tyrannical government, and they make our citizens a force to be reckoned with for any foreign threat mulling over the idea of an invasion. Whether people agree with my points or not, the cat is out of the bag and there’s no putting it back in. 122 kids have died in school shootings since Columbine rocked our nation’s consciousness in ‘99, but no law change erases hundreds of millions of guns already floating around.
I wish I had the answers our nation needs to stop the killing, but I don’t.
We’re then left with a handful of solutions that don’t involve taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.
President Trump has taken heat for voicing his opinion on arming teachers. Is it just me or do the teachers seem to be getting younger and younger? In the most underfunded and overcrowded school districts, hiring young teachers and providing incentives for more experienced ones to retire early saves money. The pool of those qualified to shoulder the burden of being armed dwindles when money is prioritized over quality.
In my experience as a former SRO, there are still responsible teachers with the appropriate life experience to be able to carry the charge of this task, but I look at it the way I look at politicians. The person you want in office or teaching a classroom full of kids with a gun in a safe under their desk is usually the person who isn’t clamoring for the power that comes with it in the first place. The ones I would have trusted during my time at the school were smart enough to want nothing to do with the insane amount of liability carrying a gun in our lawsuit-crazy world would entail. They were the same military veterans who would tell me, “I like you, Ofc. Lefever, but you’re crazy to do this job these days.”
How about the NRA talking point that we can better prevent these shootings if there is one armed ex-police officer or military vet assigned to every school? It doesn’t surprise me that most people don’t understand the mentality of police officers in this country. After all, they don’t often take the time to listen to what they have to say, but many 30-year retired officers are spent after three decades of dealing with disrespect, stress, and volatility daily. Being placed in schools to deal with rebellious teenagers is not the retirement they imagine for themselves. What you’d get is guys that don’t want to be there but need the money. More than likely, these types will do the bare minimum to collect that paycheck.
For the sake of discussion, let’s say you do get qualified and competent vets and ex-cops in every school. The left won’t even consider it because they think it will cause more harm. They acknowledge that the odds of a child dying in a mass school shooting are less than 1 in a million and insist that the ratio does not warrant police officers in schools making minority students feel less safe with their mere presence.
If the only thing I can do as a police officer to combat mass shootings in America is to be ready to lay my life on the line to save someone else’s kid, then I’ll play my role.
In reality, police are all over our streets, but they cannot be everywhere at once. Criminals will go wherever the police are not around and commit entering autos, robberies, burglaries, etc. as soon as the opportunity presents itself. At my former school, my partner and I would stand by at the entrance every morning as students poured in through metal detectors and administrators waving around gun-detecting wands. Throughout the day, truant students would enter and exit side and back doors while we were dealing with callouts to classrooms, meetings, and disturbances. Put five armed guards in any school and it will still be Swiss cheese for a determined shooter.
I wish I had the answers our nation needs to stop the killing, but I don’t. There is surely a copycat element involved in these shootings and that means there will be more Parklands. BSO Deputy Scot Peterson, the “good guy with a gun” who never entered MSDHS as the shots rang out, will have to live with blood on his hands—as will the FBI and Broward County Sheriff’s Office for failing to take appropriate action as numerous red flags put Nikolas Cruz on their radar. If the only thing I can do as a police officer to combat mass shootings in America is to be ready to lay my life on the line to save someone else’s kid, then I’ll play my role. I still trust that most of my brothers and sisters feel the same way.
