“I would like to see this, a national push, instead of parents buying kids all these tools and toys and games, invest in the classroom to make it safer,” says Fox guest Maureen O’Connell, a former FBI agent, in the aftermath of the slaughter of 15 people, including 14 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-graders at an Ulvalde, Texas elementary school. “There are companies out there that, that will do that. They’ll come out and they’ll do a threat assessment on the whole school. They’ll say, ‘This is an area of vulnerability that you might want to address, and this is how we would address it.’ And they have, I mean, they have blankets that you can put up on the wall that are colorful and beautiful, but they’re ballistic blankets. I mean, there, there are ways to obscure the, ah, the classroom windows so that the shooter can’t have target acquisition. I mean, there are just a million tools out there, but it’s, it, it…. but we’ve been banging this drum for years. Let’s start investing in our kids!”
There’s a few major problems with O’Connell’s recommendations. First, ballistic blankets and obscured windows don’t help when the shooter is already inside the school. Second, conservative parents don’t want to invest in schools; they constantly complain about tax burdens. And finally, the answer is not to put piecemeal products in place in the hope that schools won’t be targeted; it’s to get guns off the streets and make sure the people who do own guns are responsible for them and sane enough to own them.