Limiting gun ownership to people 21 and over is going to go down with a thud in the courts. Suppose I'm 20 years old, a trained navy seal. I go home on leave to Florida and I'm not allowed to own a rifle? Ain't gonna happen.
The problem is that the media have brought forth kids and parents who have a legitimate beef saying "We need to do something!" Well, they're right, and the Florida legislature has "done something." That something, or at least part of it, will go down in flames, but the politicians can say they've done something. What's actually going to work is the movement to arm teachers who are willing to go through the necessary training. Once schools no longer are "gun free zones," things will settle down a great deal.
My daughter is a teacher, dealing every day with kids at pre-university age, just before they quit the system, often for ever.
How do you imagine she, or any other person is going to handle having the added stress of guns to contend with? The kids
themselves make her require eyes in the back of her head.
Then you have to face the concept of responsibility and collateral damage in the case of an actual event ever taking place. Have most people the slightest idea of just how aggressive and confrontational parents often are, even if only as an oblique reaction to their own domestic failure to maintain discipline and student attention to homework, with the guilt that brings which has to be diverted at any cost? Imagine the parental reaction towards a teacher if an innocent child gets shot by that teacher, and let's face it, policemen, all trained, often produce plenty of collaterals!
So, teachers may be forced into a position where they have to become gun-toting cowboys or what: lose their job or get paid less than said gunslingers, and then at what age do those happy guys and Annie Oakleys get fired because their sight is failing...?
As for zones no long being gun-free, I think that will, if anything, provide the gun crazies with an ever bigger thrill: they can imagine they are in a war!
Nope, at most, and on the assumption that civilians with guns will be here to stay, the only route out of this mess will make Mr T a happy man: prison-grade walls around all schools; gates with armed police and search devices. All so that a law made in the day of the blunderbuss may be held equally applicable to the weaponry of today!
A sane person could not make that up.
