Peter Greene is outraged, as we all are, by the latest school shooting. It won’t be the last. Who is responsible for stopping the carnage, he asks. Why, the targets are. So say the politicians who have the power to stop the massacres. Their advice: more guns. Harden the target. More security at schools. Alarms on the doors. Lock the doors. Arm everyone. Practice active shooter drills. Teach the little ones what to do when the shooter is in their classroom. But for heaven’s sake, don’t take the guns away from the shooters. They have a sacred right to those guns; more sacred than the right to life of the children and teachers.

This is all madness. He knows it. We all know it.

There’s an ugly damn implication in all of this–kids and teachers are dying because they are just too easy to kill. They have to make harder targets out of themselves. They have to learn to duck and cover and fight and flee.

But the responsibility for not getting dead is all on them. Because even though this is the only damn country in the world where this regularly happens, there just isn’t a thing legislators can do about it except thoughts and prayers and banning race stuff and naughty books and making sure that abortion is illegal in all cases because they are so damned pro-fricking-life.

They’re already out there on social media, explaining that if all the teachers were armed this would never have happened. If the schools had spotted the signs this time (or ten days–TEN DAYS–ago in Buffalo) then they could have stopped this.

We won’t pass laws, we won’t support even the most rudimentary checks on firearms, but we’ll by God send you consultants and trainers and other folks to help you make yourselves harder targets (most of whom also think that gun control not only can’t, but shouldn’t happen) because if you end up dead it’s really your own damn fault…

We will now proceed with the routine and ritual. Thoughts and prayers. The proposal of stupid ideas: Arm teachers, custodians, administrators, bus drivers, because clearly more guns equals more safety and since we have the most guns on Earth we are clearly the safest nation and not one where shooting deaths and mass murders are ordinary (Yup–there’s the Texas AF, right on schedule, advocating arming teachers–you know, those evil indoctrinatin’ teachers who can’t be trusted with students). Statistics to prove that the situation isn’t really that bad. Whackburgers claiming this is a false flag meant to spur gun control–as if THAT has ever happened after a mass shooting before. Someone will blame it on mental health issues (spoiler: this will not lead to more government support for mental health treatment).

And then nothing, except the usual background noise right up until it happens the next time.

I don’t want the moon. I don’t imagine there’s a way to completely end gun violence and murder and awful scenes like we have today in Texas, but can’t we try to be better? Can’t we just try? And why wouldn’t we want to? And if you don’t want to at least try something other than saddling the targets with the responsibility for not dying, then by God do not come at me with any education reform fix the schools because it’s For The Children bullshit. You tell me what policy changes you want to implement to help keep these children alive and then I’ll listen to your yammering about phonics and saying gay.

Damn it. Just damn it.