A week and a half after the school shooting in Florida, the partisan media narrative about it was falling apart. So naturally, President Trump held a televised summit with lawmakers in which he grabbed ahold of the media's narrative and brought it back to life.
Let's start with the reality. School shootings are not increasing and have actually gone down over the past 20 years.
They are extremely rare events, and hardly any involve a rifle like the AR-15. As one researcher concluded, “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” and “while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it's unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings.” That doesn't mean that we can't do anything to improve school security, but it means that attempting to turn every school into an inverted prison on permanent lockdown—or seeking to criminalize and disarm a wide swath of the public—is a hysterical overreaction.
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