Op-Ed Thinks New Education Secretary Should Have Answered Questions About Guns

No one is going to pretend that the issue of shootings in schools, either mass murder or more pedestrian shootings, are not something to be concerned with. We might differ on the solutions, but I think most of us think the only acceptable number of school shootings is zero, though we’re also likely to disagree on what constitutes a school shooting at all.

Still, with the Trump administration in place now, the hearings for various cabinet positions included a lot of questions.

In any hearing, though, there are going to be questions left unasked. Some of them aren’t really relevant, even if some parties seem to think otherwise.

For example, asking the Secretary of Education about guns.

For almost three hours, Linda McMahon sat through a confirmation hearing last month in which senators pressed her on everything from teacher pay to transgender athletes. But none from either party asked her about school shootings.

That’s a glaring oversight, according to some leaders working to reduce youth gun violence, while others say that fears about the Department of Education’s possible closure so dominated the hearing that there was little time to question McMahon about the full spectrum of education topics. Confirmed as education secretary on March 3, it’s unclear how McMahon will address the gun violence epidemic, but her previous comments on gun control and the White House’s actions on the issue so far suggest to prevention advocates that this administration won’t make it a priority — potentially endangering youth, domestic violence victims and other vulnerable groups.

“The No. 1 concern amongst American families is making sure we have safe classrooms,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes and policies for children and families. “Can we keep our children alive in America’s classrooms? The idea that we would not even ask the next U.S. secretary of education about what she plans to do to keep our classrooms safer is ridiculous.”

It’s really not.

Violent crime of all kinds is generally beyond what the Department of Education is intended to address. That’s an issue more appropriately designated toward folks like the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security.

Or the states, themselves, which likely have a better idea of what they’re up against than anyone in Washington.

Linda McMahon will helm an agency that many think shouldn’t even exist. For the record, I’m one of them. As it stands, the Department of Education doesn’t actually run any schools at all. They just write checks and issue policies for what schools, school systems, and states have to do in order to get that money. That’s the long and the short of what they do.

While they could, hypothetically, offer grants for school security, this is a federal department that has no expertise in criminality–at least beyond what any other federal bureaucrat has, which is usually not on the prevention side.

McMahon wasn’t asked about it because it’s beyond any relevant expertise anyone considered for that role could have.

Then, of course, we have the paragraph trying to suggest that no one wants to prevent shootings, which is nonsense. The fact that we’re not tripping over ourselves to support gun control doesn’t mean no one is taking the matter seriously. The Trump administration has made it clear that they just don’t think gun control is the mechanism to do that.

And it’s not.

But anti-gunners live in their own little world. Reality is irrelevant to them, and this is prove.