CAPTION: Don Bendell and national hero Jeanne Assam a few years ago.

By Don Bendell

How To End School Shootings

Mass school shootings are wholly preventable, if people will just put empathy for our children ahead of political agendas and naivete. There have been several reasons why the incidence of such killings have increased, such as the horrific shooting recently in Uvalde, Texas. How we respond to such mass shootings has a very tremendous impact on how often similar scenarios will reoccur or will be prevented.

It was early AM, December 9, 2007, and 24-year-old Matthew John Murray opened fire with a pistol at the Youth With a Mission training center in Arvada, Colorado killing two and wounding two more. Evading police, he made it to Colorado Springs an hour south, equipped with 3,000 rounds of ammunition, and several weapons and pyrotechnics. Getting out of his vehicle in the parking lot of the massive New Life Christian Church a short time after services ended, he opened fire with a Bushmaster AR-15-rifle. He killed two teenaged sisters near their car and wounded their father, shooting him multiple times, wounded another woman in the parking lot, and a man near the church entrance. He then entered the church lobby and began firing while parishioners ran screaming, a few wounded. That was his fatal mistake.

Church volunteer safety guard, a Colorado law enforcement officer, and former Minneapolis police officer, Jeanne Assam identified herself as a police officer, repeatedly demanded he drop his weapons, and exchanged fire with the crazed gunman, who many said often spoke about hearing voices. Although he was firing a semiautomatic rifle, Jeanne advanced quickly forward into his withering fire shooting him ten times, with two of her final rounds hitting his carotid artery and jugular vein on the sides of his neck and head killing him. Her last two bullet casings were found by investigators less than five feet away from his body and Jeanne was sprayed with arterial blood, his not hers.

Murray had previously published numerous hateful statements against Christians and Christianity on social media. He clearly represented pure evil that day having said he wanted to kill many Christians. Jeanne stood up against evil that day representing God and His followers. She was untouched by any bullets and saved countless lives.  

I told Jeanne about me writing this editorial, and she said, “We as police officers took an oath to protect and serve. We have the equipment, and we have the training. You keep that oath that you swore to people and whether you live or die, you do whatever it takes to eliminate the threat. Fear is not an option.”

Besides Jeanne walking the walk as a hero, so did several Border Patrol Agents in Uvalde who rushed to the scene, ignored orders of hand-wringing local law enforcement officials to wait, and entered the school with three of them engaging the shooter and killing him. Another off-duty CBP agent, Jacob Alborado, got a scary set of texts from his wife, a teacher at Robb Elementary, borrowed a shotgun from the barber shop where he had been getting a trim, and rushed to protect his wife and daughter. With other agents, he aided in the rescue of several rooms full of children, including his own daughter, Jayda, while LEO leaders were still in an outside hallway waiting for better equipment.

Our police need to be lionized, properly-funded, constantly trained, and supported. They should never be trivialized, cut down, shot down, put-down, or politicized at every opportunity. On top of that, we need to reinstitute some mental facilities for the criminally insane, or disturbed individuals showing deadly intentions, and get those people professional caring help, and remove the societal threat of some people from the streets who are very unstable and are potential serial killers, before they kill. Along with that, prosecutors, sheriffs, chiefs of police, and judges who create a revolving door justice system in their jurisdictions, need to be removed and replaced.   Our nation simply does not work without our system of justice working. Nor does it work with dysfunctional families. Parents seeing such behavior in their children, adult or child, have a duty to their community to report them and not shield them from scrutiny by mental health professionals.

School shootings have drastically increased in America ever since the passage of the “Safe School Act of 1990.” I know the media and democratic politicians love to blame former President Donald Trump for every bad thing that ever happens in America, but please understand this: The “Safe School Act of 1990” was created and sponsored by then-Senator Joe Biden - our current President, and the bill was signed into law by then-President George H. W. Bush. The school gun free zone law regulated signs outside of schools that read “This is a Gun Free Zone,” and in most states, anybody within 500 feet, or 1,000 feet in some places, of a school carrying a gun, even off-duty cops, can be arrested, fined, and jailed, making the sign a warm welcoming sign for sociopaths and the criminally unbalanced. School shooters are usually psychopaths and universally are by nature bullies. What is easier than shooting a bunch of innocent children in an area where guns ore outlawed.

We need armed school safety officers back in most schools, specific exit and entrance doors at those schools, interior classroom emergency door locking devices, which are already in existence, and special lockdown alarm alerts. We also need some level-headed teachers, trained in safe gun handling, such as many teachers who are veterans, to carry concealed in schools.

When there are shootings like this, politicos only thinking of their own agendas, start demanding more gun control and stricter gun laws. We have tons of gun laws. Do you think these active shooters care about laws concerning magazine size, calibers, or capacity? President Joe Biden created that gun free zone law with the same intelligence he recently displayed on national TV stating that the nine-millimeter bullet should be outlawed because it causes too much damage. The nine-millimeter is the most popular self-defense cartridge in America, but cannot even penetrate a Kevlar vest in most cases, by the way.

The very wise framers of the Second Amendment did not pen that document, because they wanted us to kill more deer. They had just liberated our country from the oppression of our ancestor’s personal freedoms by an over-controlling government. We no longer need a side-saddle President who should have been put out to pasture long ago and prefers the smell of the hair of little girls and young women to the acrid smell of gunpowder from his own gun. We also need to eliminate any in his posse who supports his ludicrous agenda. Wannabe leaders like that, throughout history, have gotten thousands killed.  

You don’t need assault weapons for hunting, but to safely protect our loved ones from home invasions, foreign invasions, and illegal government invasions. Hitler and every fanatical leader in modern history who killed its own citizenry and incarcerated dissenters with perverted justice did so by first removing people’s guns. Get rid of assault weapons so the ninety-some percent of us who are decent citizens cannot protect ourselves? Give me a break! I am buying even more ammo and more guns. because one of my main responsibilities in my life is to protect my family. On top of that, according to the FBI, three and a half times as many people are killed each year by knives than guns.

All you have to do is simply look at the preponderance of shootings and murders by gun in Chicago, Washington, DC, and other cities that have enacted the toughest gun control laws in the nation. Each year in the United States innocent American citizens protecting their homes, businesses, families, and property, have used firearms approximately a half million times to thwart crimes.

I just looked at a video of a punk on a crowded New York subway walking down the aisle ranting, grabbing an innocent young woman by the hair.

Obviously scared out of her wits, she meekly said, “Somebody help me, please.”

I saw at least a dozen men in that video sit there and do nothing while he held and jerked her around by her hair. Fortunately, he stood, dragged her a few feet, and pushed her away. What has happened to American men? They have turned into the sissies you too often see on commercials or in sitcoms. They worry more about their man-bun or shaving their legs than acting like a man. I would rather be shot to doll rags, stomped into a puddle of mud by gang-bangers, or stabbed repeatedly than to have my wife, daughter, or grand-daughter think I did not try to protect them when danger suddenly appeared. Most of us males have greater muscle mass and body size than our female loved ones. God made us that way, so we can protect them. It does not make us better or more important.

OMG! Did I mention God, and it is not Sunday morning? The first answer to ending school shootings is to get God back in our schools . . .and our families , , ,and our lives. Millions upon millions have struggled for years to reach our shores, learn our language, our history, our legacy of freedom, and apply for citizenship. They do not build walls along the borders of socialist or communist countries to keep such people out, only to keep people in. The biggest strategy to end school shootings is to return to what made America great.  We must all get back to one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Don Bendell is a best-selling author whose style has been likened to Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, and Robin Moore. Don is a former US Army Special Forces Captain and 100% disabled Green Beret Vietnam veteran, and a 1995 inductee into the International Karate and Kickboxing Hall of Fame. Don owns the Strongheart Ranch in southern Colorado, with his social psychologist and fellow author, wife, Dr. Janet Bendell. Don is the author of 30 books, mainly westerns and military thrillers, with over 3,000,000 copies in print worldwide, a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2011, and a successful motion picture which he also produced, directed, and co-starred in. He has 6 grown children and 13 grand-children and has a master’s degree in leadership from Grand Canyon University.

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