Current school year barely underway before Georgia shootings
It didn’t take long for the first mass school shooting of the 2024-25 academic year, the slaying of two students and two staff and injuries to at least nine others at the high school in Winder, Georgia, an exurb of Atlanta.
The only surprise is that it took a couple of weeks from the beginning of the current school year to start this year’s shooting syndrome. Because of the proliferation of these incidents, it won’t be long before Las Vegas bookies start taking bets on the number of shootings this year, probably over-under wagering. Take the over.
This week’s school shooting was the 36th in 2024, a decline from the record 82 in 2023. But there’s still nearly four months to match last year’s all-time high.
If the former president has his way, the record could be broken. He squandered an opportunity to do something prophylactic after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre that killed 17 Florida students and faculty in Parkland on Valentine’s Day six years ago. But he wilted in the face of opposition of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in his typical profile in lack of courage. This campaign season he has doubled down by vowing to the NRA that, if re-elected, he will veto any gun safety measures and not implement any others by executive order. It’s a parallel to his “Drill. Baby Drill” mantra: “Shoot, Baby, Shoot.”
But to be fair, his administration did forbid bump stock devices that convert ordinary rifles into rapid-killing machines after an even more massive shooting during his term in Las Vegas. But the Supreme Court, with his vaunted trio of conservative appointees, earlier this year shot down that prohibition on grounds that any such proscription must come from Congress, a non-starter where 60 voters are needed in the deadlocked Senate to enact legislation accompanying majority approval in the House of Representatives.
However, his response to the Georgia shooting was typically tepid, lamenting the deranged 14-year-old youth who has been accused, attributing it to the “angry” state of the world, and citing his support by Hungarian authoritarian leader Victor Orban with nary of word about the real cause: easy access to firearms.
Vice President Harris, for her part, condemned the latest “senseless” tragedy, consistent with her support for sensible gun safety measures as a prosecutor in California, as a senator, and in her current position in the Biden administration, and has taken a strong stance in favor of meaningful actions to curb the scourge of school shootings and other mass firearm murders.
The Georgia school shooting is, regrettably, yet another reminder of the chasm that separates the presidential candidates, especially here in Florida, where Governor DeSantis and his legislative cohorts have loosened the gun laws to such an extent that more mass shootings are not only looming, but likely.
Marshall H. Tanick of Naples is a constitutional law attorney.