Gingrich: Here's a practical proposal to protect our children

Wednesday’s tragic attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is a deeply painful reminder of how much we have failed to honestly confront the problem of school shootings in America.

Putting up “Gun-Free Zone” signs is not a solution. It is an act of self-deception. By definition, the determined killers carry their guns past the signs. They are not slowed down for one second by community sentiment.

The current strategies of responding to a violent threat by either freezing students in place or accelerating student evacuation both carry seeds of disaster. Freezing the students in place simply sets them up to be killed methodically by a brutal, evil or mentally ill person. Having them flee may lead them to run right into the path of the killer.

In “Day of Wrath,” a novel by Bill Forstchen, there is a vivid description of how dangerous our current school policies are in setting up the innocent to be killed. In this stunning depiction of a methodical radical Islamist assault targeting American schools, the moral and intellectual dead-end of the current policies is made clear.

America is not going to become gun-free. Firearm-specific bans, such as bans on semi-automatic rifles, won’t have an impact because the majority of mass shootings in the United States are committed with semi-automatic handguns..

More here