by Ed Sperry, Col USAF (ret), Stevensville
I’m a truly aged citizen. I’m proud of and love my great grandkids. The recent tragic events in Texas have caused me to pause and ponder. Of course I am referring to the recent invasion of the school in Uvalde, Texas and the horrible slaughter that took place. It seems to have already faded from our memory. I wonder. Could it be that we will not focus on prevention of such an incident until the next time such a tragic intrusion occurs?
Frankly, I suspect this is the case. There are just too many pressing issues to keep this on a front burner. After all, the occurrence is highly unlikely. A tragic fire is also unlikely, but, we sure as hell prepare against it. Do you, as a citizen of Ravalli County, have any idea of whether we are prepared or not in each of the various county public schools? I sure don’t. It doesn’t matter if you have a kid in school. We all care and should encourage any needed preparation. In fact, we each share degrees of responsibility.
Perhaps it’s time for concerned citizens to query the local school district officials about this matter. It seems reasonable to ask about the following:
• Control of access?
• Intentions on having internal defense capability?
• Provisions for and protection of communications?
• Provisions for necessary training and procedural doctrine and drill
• Financial issues?
• Response capability of law enforcement?
These seem to me to be reasonable concerns and deserve public attention and support. I think it is urgent and deserves serious timely attention. As with fires, when it happens it’s too late to prepare. It is a serious issue as the tragedies will continue to occur until our society regains its moral compass. We may be pleasantly surprised. If so, consider this. If everything is secret there is no deterrence.
I’ll close with a reminder about a lesson of the Cold War which is still adhered to and is applicable to this issue. Deterrence depends upon having a capability to respond to an attack, the intruder must know of this capability and believe the defender will use it.
Amen!
Gomez says
Good suggestions, but you forgot one: Limit access to weapons so fierce that a battalion of trained, heavily armed police officers wearing full body armor and equipped with ballistic shields are still cowed by an untrained kid wielding one of them.
Alan says
Weapons so fierce? Lol. You have no idea what your talking about. .What weapons, specifically, are you talking about?
Gomez says
They were not afraid to enter the classroom because he was armed with a pocket knife, a bb gun, a 22 pistol or even a shotgun. If you can’t figure the rest of it out and instead would rather argue about semantics or technical definitions then you have shown yourself to be not someone who is being intellectually honest nor someone worthy of having this discussion with.