Zombie Ideas Never Die

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: after yet another mass shooting involving an assault rifle, Republicans and the NRA come up with a brilliant idea to solve the problem: Oh, I know! Let’s arm teachers!

I know, right? We’ve certainly never heard that one before (except, well, after every single school shooting. In 2014, 2013, 2012 ….)

And of course the dim bulb in the White House thinks it’s a brilliant idea!

It’s just so perfect that after all of this national discussion and amazing student activism we’ve seen over the past week the NRA and Republicans return to their standard solution: more guns! That is how terrified they are of even the teensiest bit of restrictions on their weapons.

And the media is acting like this is some completely new idea they’ve never heard before. Guys: we’ve had this discussion a bazillion times already. We’ve already talked about how teachers don’t want this, how it’s not an effective solution, how the problem is all the goddamn guns, not the lack of guns. How we already force teachers to pay for their own school supplies, and now you’re going to ask them to buy guns and ammo and training?

Let’s remember that at Columbine High School there were not one but two armed officers on-site:

Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy Neil] Gardner [the school’s community resource officer], seeing Harris working with his gun, leaned over the top of the car and fired four shots. He was 60 yards from the gunman. Harris spun hard to the right and Gardner momentarily thought he had hit him. Seconds later, Harris began shooting again at the deputy. After the exchange of gunfire, Harris ran back into the building. Gardner was able to get on the police radio and called for assistance from other Sheriff’s units. “Shots in the building. I need someone in the south lot with me.”

An armed guard shot at Eric Harris. It didn’t work. Two students murdered 13 people and injured 21.

There’s more:

Virginia Tech, the site of the deadliest U.S. gun massacre ever committed by one person, has a police department on the grounds. According to the AP, the shootings in that incident took place over just 9 minutes — it took the campus police 3 minutes to reach the building, and five minutes to break into the building, which had been locked by the gunman.

At the Colorado cinema shootings earlier this year, it took police officers just 90 seconds to get to the scene of the shooting, but 70 people had already been shot; 12 fatally.

That’s how long we’ve been talking about this. How many more school shootings will there be before we stop rehashing the same, tired ideas?

The NRA’s answer is always ALWAYS going to be “more guns.” They don’t have any other ideas than “more guns.” But the problem isn’t that we have too few guns. The problem is too many guns.

Times’ up on these idiotic zombie ideas.