After a gunman murdered 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last week, politicians responded as they always do to such shocking crimes. Democrats pushed gun control policies ranging from the symbolic to the flagrantly irrelevant, while Republicans emphasized improvements to school security.
On its face, “hardening” schools so they are less vulnerable to attack seems more logical than banning “assault weapons” defined by functionally unimportant features or expanding the federal background-check requirement for gun buyers, which is ill-suited to deterring mass shooters because they typically do not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records.
