School shootings and the Obama administration’s broken PROMISE

FIRST PRINCIPLES

In the nearly two months since crazed gunman Nikolas Cruz opened fire at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in his own version of the Valentine's Day Massacre, we have been treated to the usual calls for more gun control, and even a nationwide, designed-to-appear-spontaneous social media outpouring of youth, complete with marches on the capitol, rallies in cities across the nation, and well-orchestrated nationwide classroom walkouts.

Among the demands? Require universal background checks before gun sales, and adopt gun violence restraining order statutes that will allow courts to disarm people -- without an adversarial hearing -- whom others claim have displayed warning signs of violent behavior.

But such gun control proposals would not have prevented this massacre. There was ample opportunity for law enforcement to prevent Cruz's acquisition of the weapons he used, had his violent, anti-social record not been repeatedly papered over as the result of Broward County's adoption of President Barack Obama's misguided PROMISE program -- the Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support & Education program designed to slow the "school to prison" pipeline by not reporting crimes to police or otherwise disciplining problem students.

The demands of the student protestors are therefore misplaced. Worse, when one ponders why these additional gun control measures would have been ineffectual, one is left with the distinct impression that perhaps this tragedy, or something like it, was part of a long-term, strategic plan, of Saul Alinsky-ite origin.

Alinsky famously wrote in his notorious book "Rules for Radicals," that revolutionaries should never let a good crisis go to waste, and they should foster a crisis if there isn't already one at hand. School shootings provide the "crisis" that leads to calls for gun control, even for the abolition of the Second Amendment itself. But the PROMISE program has all the hallmarks of a program designed to foster those crises, if they were not happening often enough to produce the desired result. Keep what we used to call "juvenile delinquents" in school rather than expelling them, for example, where they can pose an ongoing threat to other students and a constant disruption of educational efforts. Impose slap-on-the-wrist disciplinary sanctions that do not become part of a permanent record, rather than referring criminal conduct to the criminal justice system. In short, allow juvenile delinquents like Nikolas Cruz to perfect his anti-social violent craft largely unpunished and unreported. And then, based upon that phonied-up unblemished disciplinary record, allow him to purchase guns that, should he predictably use them for evil purposes, would generate the crisis necessary to restrict the purchase of firearms by law-abiding citizens. Alinsky could not be more proud!

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But then, recall that something similar appears to have been at the root of the Fast and Furious "gunwalking" program, adopted in the early days of the Obama administration, through which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives encouraged gun dealers to sell large numbers of guns to suspected drug traffickers. As reported by CBS News at the time, documents it had obtained from a whistleblower indicated that ATF hoped to use the fallout from the Fast and Furious program to justify new gun regulations. As one law enforcement official noted, "It's like ATF created or added to the problem so they could be the solution to it and pat themselves on the back." Or manufacture a crisis that would advance the gun control agenda.

So what should the "March for our Lives" protestors be demanding if they truly have had #Enough, to borrow their Twitter meme? Well, for starters, they should demand that the Broward County School Board revoke the "Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline," which allowed Cruz to fly under the radar until he lit up the radar that fateful day back in February. They should demand that the federal government quit providing grants to school districts for not reporting criminal activity of their students to law enforcement authorities, under the misguided theory that by not reporting such crimes, crime statistics are reduced and, voila, the schools are safer. And they should demand that Obama's PROMISE program, reflected in "Dear Colleague" letters and other documents still being touted on the U.S. Department of Education's website, be repealed.

Of course, such common-sense steps only make sense if the protesters are really interested in making their schools safer. If they, or the organizers that helped bring them together, instead persist in demands to restrict the constitutionally protected Second Amendment rights of law-abiding, gun-owning citizens despite the fact that such measures would not have prevented the Parkland tragedy, then I guess we will know what they are really about. The PROMISE program would be, for them, not a broken PROMISE but a promise fulfilled. And the unsafe schools that result? Well, that's just the crisis they have to bear to accomplish something as radical as repealing a provision of the Bill of Rights. Rules for Radicals is not for the faint-hearted, after all.