Have faith in humanity, goodness

The reason President Barack Obama's address last night at the service for victims in the Sandy Hook shooting is much ado about nothing is that at the core of his liberal mind is little faith in people to be responsible and good.

When our president asks "Are we doing enough to keep our children safe" and then answers himself with the pledge to use "whatever power this office holds" to prevent more tragedies like Sandy Hook, what he means is government must step in and take away freedoms of all people to "prevent" the actions of a few.

First, someone needs to tell the president that he is not God and neither is his federal government. Preventing all future bad acts is simply not within his power.

This kind of knee-jerk thinking will translate into the usual unlawful (and provably ineffective) attempts to restrict gun ownership as well as any number of freedom-eroding proposals based on the idea that to limit bad behavior by the few, we must broadly limit the behavior of the many.

It is TSA thinking. It's the easy way out to a feel-good, ineffective solution.

(Believe me, I am sure we'll get into the specifics of some of these proposals in blogs later this week and probably in my Sunday newspaper essay, as the president and others will now feel free to step on the corpses of the little ones at Sandy Hook to achieve their petty political agendas. They are TSA thinkers, less interested in real-life, effective solutions than in theoretical feel-good solutions.)

Instead of treating all people as bad based on the actions of a few, it would be far more instructive to treat people as good until proven otherwise.

Don't give people less responsibility, give them more. Teach people to appreciate, understand and use guns as part of America's unique heritage.

Instead of having a system in which the principal of an elementary school must rush a deranged gunman unarmed, as was the case in Sandy Hook (brave as it was), let's give her a fighting chance by training her to confront such situations with a handgun in which she has been trained and is comfortably proficient. Then, instead of getting slaughtered in the hallway, maybe she could have taken a crouched position and yelled: "Freeze, you sonofabitch, or I swear to God I'll shoot you where you stand!"

If the president wants to be helpful and back up his words about using his office to help, he should come off the old saw of gun control and create a national discussion on finding ways to get people with budding mental health issues some real help.

I doubt the president knows how difficult it is for parents to get mental health help in this country. It's a nightmare of fighting and scratching to just get the basics. And most of the time, people can't even get that.

Let's use our time talking about that, Mr. President.

Look, I'm a card-carrying, pay-as-you-go, keep-what-you-earn conservative. And, I'm telling you there's plenty of common ground on the right and left for a meaningful discussion on mental health services in America.

But I don't think President Obama wants to explore the hard answers.

I'd like to be wrong on this. But I know I'm not.