What legitimate purpose is served when CNN uses victims of a horrendous crime to foment hatred and rage in an auditorium and throughout the nation?  Wednesday evening's orgy of anger is the perfect illustration of the malignant partisanship in play at both CNN and other progressive news organizations.  To describe Wednesday's meeting as a town hall is a misnomer of titanic proportions.  It was a media-created hate session preying on the raw emotions created by the wanton murder of 17 individuals, mostly students.

On a related issue, the Broward County Sheriff's Office was reportedly called to the home of shooter Nikolas Cruz, 39 times, before Cruz inflicted his horror on the community.  In fact, we now learn that while Cruz was on his killing spree, the sheriff's armed deputy assigned to protect the school cowered outside instead of attempting to save lives.  How rich is it, then, that Broward County sheriff Scott Israel had the audacity to point a finger of blame at the National Rifle Association?

Does there exist in the United States today any price for failure?  Is there anything other than an accusation of sexual harassment that can get a "public servant" fired?

When considering the source of failures making possible this tragedy, one needs look no farther than a school district that by its progressive policy refused to report to the police criminal behavior within its student body, a sheriff's department that saw no reason to arrest Cruz despite a reported 39 complaints, an armed deputy lacking the courage to enter the building and confront the shooter ,and an FBI that apparently ignored specific warnings about Cruz's posted intention to become a school shooter.  At so many levels, this crime was preventable.

Prevention, however, creates its own problems, for without an occasional public massacre, the hyper political anti-gun lobby might be forced to disband.  Without such occasional horrors, CNN and MSNBC would have difficulty maintaining and firing up their semi-rabid viewer bases.  Indeed, horror of horrors, a significant majority of citizens might even toy with the unthinkable possibility that the Trump presidency might be an overall net positive for America.  Certainly this cannot be allowed to happen!

Why is it that with numerous steps available by which safety in our schools can be improved, such steps have been ignored?  Why, rather than evaluating and implementing necessary steps to increase security and harden up school campuses, have our politicians at both state and federal levels allowed schools to remain sitting-duck gun-free zones, thereby inviting disaster?

Why does it take President Trump – whom the "resistance" vilifies, depending on the mood of the moment, as ignorant, unqualified, insane, immoral, or dictatorial – to actually start a serious conversation regarding student safety?  Where have our conservative Republicans been on this issue?  What of the blathering Democrats?  What have they proposed to actually improve school safety?  Student safety, for our political classes, seems only tangential to the real goal of the progressive Democratic Party: confiscation of guns and the destruction of our Second Amendment freedom.  If it were otherwise, meaningful steps would have by now been taken.

Republicans have failed us by allowing Democrats to turn every issue or tragedy into an argument on gun control or some other freedom-weakening, leftist-loved issue.  As long as weak-kneed Republicans allow progressives to define the issues, nothing will be accomplished. The good news is that with President Trump at the head of state, things are changing.  For the first time, concrete steps will be considered and likely taken that will have an actual bearing on student safety.  Indeed, by following Trump's example, Republicans should see how essential it is to set and defend an agenda that actually solves problems.

Instead of defending itself against straw men set up by Democrats and their media masters, Republicans are becoming the party of solutions.  Who would have thought Donald Trump would be the catalyst for such change?

Image: Ninian Reid via Flickr.