On May 18th, a student in Santa Fe, Texas killed 10 students and injured another 10. This was the deadliest school shooting since the Valentine's day shooting at Stoneman Douglas, Florida. The Stoneman Douglas shooting led to nationwide school walkouts and a massive protest in Washington DC. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that none of that will happen with the Santa Fe shooting.
My reasoning is that the Stoneman Douglas shooting was politically beneficial to the Democrats and the gun control crowd (which has a huge overlap). The gun used in the Florida shooting was an "assault weapon" and some of the survivors from the shooting immediately blamed Republicans and the NRA for not banning that class of gun. This was magical thinking - the insistence that the shooting would not have happened if only the shooter had been denied a particular class of weapon.
Democrats and anti-gun activists rallied in the hope that this tragedy would add to the predicted "blue wave". The NRA was condemned as a near-terrorist organization and Democrats began running on an anti-gun platform for the first time in a generation.
But the Texas shooter changed all that. he used a shotgun and a 38-special revolver. None of the "common sense gun control" provisions being demanded would have touched these weapons. An old-fashioned six-shooter does not have a high-capacity magazine. I haven't heard any details about the shotgun but they seldom hold more than five or six shots.
These are weapons that date back to the 19th century. All of the arguments about military-style weapons being too dangerous for civilians evaporate when presented with this shooting. The only argument left is a total ban on all guns. That moves well beyond what's reasonable.
A second reason that we will not see a repeat of the activism from the Florida shooting is the counter-protest. The NRA got a huge membership and fund-raising bonus from all of the anti-NRA activism. This is important because gun owners are more motivated to vote on a single issue than non-gun owners. Having someone propose taking your property away is a concrete action. Wanting to take away someone else's property is abstract. Concrete beats abstract in the polls. This will be even more urgent if Democrats propose going after revolvers and shotguns.
So, there will be no mass nationwide demonstrations, no marches on Washington, no student activists.
A few thoughts about the shootings in general. In Texas, things worked as they should - the shooter was stopped by the school safety officer. There was no indication that the police were cowering outside the school until the shooting ended.
In both cased plus Sandy Hook, the shooters got their weapons through their parents. The Florida shooter's mother bought him his AR-15 and at least one pistol because he was on the school shooting team. The Santa Fe and Sandy Hook shooters took their parents' guns. People were referring to the Bushmaster rifle the Sandy Hook shooter used as the "mass murderer's weapon of choice" but it wasn't. It was the gun his mother used for target practice. The lesson here is that when a parent owns weapons then provisions need to be made to keep those weapons out of the hands of disturbed teenagers.
The Santa Fe shooter was apparently emulating the Columbine killers. He wore a black trench coat and had some bombs. Initial reports are that the bombs were dummies but that still shows the futility of trusting in gun control to stop school killings. Disturbed teems will find a way. Note: Columbine was supposed to be a bombing. The killers started shooting after their bomb failed to explode. And they were not wearing black trench coats during the shooting. They weren't even part of the "Trench Coat Mafia".
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