Friday, April 20 marks (ed) the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting and students across the nation walked out in protest of not only school violence, but also in support of gun-rights restrictions. Fourth District Congressman, Steve King, was in Carroll Friday and says that the media has essentially censored those who want to defend their Second Amendment rights and at the same time emboldened those wishing to take those rights away. He adds he has asked one question that has caused some controversy.
King has studied 29 mass school shootings, from 1924 with a bombing in Michigan that killed 40, all the way up to and past those that have occurred since the Columbine shooting. He says one occurring in 1966 was three years after prayer came out of public schools and that shortly after morality started being removed from instruction, there was a spike in the number of incidents in the 1980s. Following that, guns were banned in school zones, and from that time on, King says about every year to year and a half there has been a mass shooting in one of our nation’s schools. He believes it is a compounding of factors that creates these situation, such as the over-medication of our children, illegal and prescription drug abuse and the fact that only one of the 29 shooters came from a home with both parents present,
This then, King says, is a cultural problem, not a gun problem and he wants to address it from the mental health, family and drug side. It is critical to do this now and attack the problem instead of the guns, he says.
On this anniversary date, King tells of a previous trip he made to Columbine, the site of a tragedy that is believed to have spawned a number of school shootings since.
King adds he sat in that parking lot on that day and put up a prayer that they could gain some understanding—because that understanding is the key to solving the problem.
