Santa Fe: Yet Another Shooting.

Barely three months after the shooting at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, We have yet another mass shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, 40 kilometers south of Houston, Texas. There is little we can say or do right now, except let our thoughts be with the families of the murdered and our prayers with those injured and their relatives. As usual, the president has sent in condolences and tons of promises to rectify an enduring, odious and cancerous phenomenon. We can do better than take him for his words. It is a bit difficult to sift through reports now but one suggested(it may be altered yet) that a boy saw the shooter walk in with a shotgun and managed to trigger the fire alarm. This singular act of bravery and vigilance may yet turn out to be what will limit the casualty figures.
It is a vigilance we've been advocating on this forum. Gun controls and outright abolition are vital but a determined mass murderer will always get the weapons to perpetrate his evil. In the same way that the Prohibition did not deter guys intent on quaffing their whisky or bourbon. Gun legislation need to be tweaked, very fast, so also are privacy laws. That dictum of aloofness "It ain't my business" doesn't sound all that musical again when horrors like these crop up. Safety is everyone's business. Those who commit these evils do so with detailed planning and in most cases a vigilant mother or grandmother or friend or girlfriend, acquaintances or even curious, not nosy, neighbors could have prevented the carnage as a result of filial intervention or simply tipping off law enforcement agents. Nothing is private again when shots ring out.