Uvalde, Texas and How to Stop School Shootings

On Tuesday, an 18-year-old murdered 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School, one of the public schools in Uvalde, Texas – 80 miles west of downtown San Antonio, 54 miles east of the border with Mexico.

The Wall Street Journal reports the gunman was shooting outside the school for 12-minutes before entering the building through an unlocked door and barricading himself in a classroom full of children.

The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has confirmed that the shooter “was not confronted by law enforcement before he entered…”

Amanda Prestigiacomo at the Daily Wire reports that parents gathered outside of the school urged law enforcement to enter the school to confront the shooter, but were ignored. Some were allegedly even handcuffed, tackled, thrown to the ground, and pepper-sprayed by authorities when they attempted to intervene themselves.

According to Not the Bee, Robb Elementary is a 4-minute drive from the police station. Law enforcement took 15-minutes to get there. 

“By most reports, there was a 40-minute window where police stood down and did nothing to stop the shooter.” And not only did law enforcement not go in, they used less-than-lethal measures to prevent parents from entering the school to take matters into their own hands.

Whether we’re talking sins of commission or sins of omission, this horrific incident was caused not by firearms or mental illness, nor even primarily by a certain response or lack thereof by local law enforcement. No, first and foremost this was caused by man’s sinful nature run amok in our country, and for too long being affirmed and excused rather than confronted, confessed, and repented of.

For starters, a pattern of widespread and excessive reliance on civil authorities across the board, over and against parental engagement and responsibility, directly contributed to this. The same U.S. government that has told us for nearly 50-years that it’s okay to abort our children also implores us to send our children off to them for instruction, and the majority of us give our consent, all too happy to be affirmed in doing so. What were we thinking?

Even when the government tells us we’re not allowed to rescue our own children in an active shooter scenario like what happened in Uvalde on Tuesday, as they too stand by outside the school building – here also too many of us will all-too-meekly obey what every decent instinct inside our souls tells us we ought not to. And this is because we long ago abdicated our God-given duty as parents.

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child; it takes a Mom and Dad.

Mothers and fathers are the primary caregivers and caretakers of children by God’s design. But if you wait until an incident like this to realize that, or act accordingly, you have waited too long and it’s already too late.

The bystander effect says that when something is everyone’s responsibility, that’s near enough to saying that thing is no one’s responsibility. And that’s how we need to think of the assertion that it takes a village, or the government, to raise our children. That’s how we need to think of the plight of modern American public education. These children are said to belong to the community, and we are far too trusting of others to make the day-to-day decisions of what is best for them, ignoring warning signs along the way so long as most of our countrymen are similarly going along with it.

I say this with grief and heaviness of heart – what happened in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday is exactly the sort of thing that happens when godlessness and collectivism are embraced wholesale. They break down a society, especially where the rearing of children is concerned.

Those who contributed to this tragedy by demanding pragmatic, practical godlessness and collectivism in our schools and communities for decades will insist on ever more of the same as a solution. They will double down. They will try harder next time. Once more with feeling. But that will only make matters worse and worse until we finally reach the breaking point and opt out of their failed paradigm for our children and families.

Governing authority is God-given and God-ordained, and should be a blessing to a nation exalted by righteousness. But the role of godly government is two-fold: to reward those who do good and to punish those who do evil. Daily we see the evidences that human flourishing and civilization crumble when government either refuses to do both, or else does their opposites – rewarding those who do evil and punishing those who do good. Not content with the authority vested in it by the Almighty, godless government seeks ever more and more to play God, and the results are always tragic and destructive.

Calls for more Gun Control in the wake of what happened on Tuesday are therefore problematic on two fronts. For one, they promise to punish and constrict those who exercise their Constitutional and God-given right to self-defense by infringing more and more on their ability to do so against wicked men like the shooter who murdered 21-people, mostly children, in Uvalde. But more importantly, such responses are dangerous because they miss the point entirely, and distract from one simple truth – these shootings are happening because we have celebrated all our personal and national sin instead of repenting of it.

If we want to stop school shootings like the one that happened in Uvalde on Tuesday, what is needed is not more Gun Control. What is needed is more Self-Control and Family Control – i.e., mothers and fathers recommitting to marriage and the rearing of their sons and daughters in God-fearing homes. What is needed is not more government, then, but rather less civil government continuing to usurp the proper role of mothers and fathers and churches.

As comedian Drew Lynch puts it, school shootings can’t happen if we ban schools – specifically public schools. And this is why we homeschool.

The common denominator here isn’t ready access to firearms for bad people, nor is it even mental health in the abstract. Rather, the combination of firearms and angry young men who’ve been trained up in the way they should not go intersects with the abandonment of marriage and parenting, and the insistence on an educational scheme for children which instills the opposite of the fear of the Lord from little on up. The fools say in their hearts and our classrooms that there is no God, then we’re all shocked to find cold-blooded killers in our midst. But what else were we going to get?

It’s past time to make peace with our Maker first and foremost, then set to work healing broken homes by His grace, extricating our children from de facto government guardianship from sea to shining sea so they can be brought up in the fear and instruction of the Lord. Do that, and the school shootings we have been all-too-accustomed to hearing and reading about in the news the last 30-years will stop. Mark my words.

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