OPINION: It won’t be perfect, but we must do something

Today, we ALL live in Uvalde, Texas.

Unless you live under a rock in a dirt hole, you already know what happened there Tuesday at Robb Elementary School.

So, let’s get to the point. It’s about guns and people who should not get their hands on guns.

I am not a gun enthusiast, but I grew up around them. My childhood home contained at least one rifle and pistol. I remember, around age eight or nine, tagging along with dad as he climbed a barbed-wire fence to shoot a groundhog that kept digging holes in the yard.

I think every household along Plum Creek contained guns. Up the road in Marion, my uncle-by-marriage Lee Kilby topped everyone I knew. His living room contained a massive gun cabinet with glass doors, filled with rifles, shotguns, pistols, ammunition, cleaning supplies. He loved to hunt.

Uncle Lee, a Marine veteran of World War II and Korea, could have started his own mini-war with his citizen’s arsenal.

In Uvalde, an 18-year-old carried an AR-15 assault rifle, legally purchased in a gun store. Evidence is emerging that people knew or suspected he intended to do terrible things with it.

Surely we all can agree on this one thing: If we suspect someone will use a gun to harm innocent people, that person should be kept away from guns. Is that too much to ask?

Some of you are wondering if I’m headed down a path about gun confiscation. Many of you believe the feds are looking for ways — maybe even crafting the master plan — to remove firearms from your house, your vehicle, your pocket and your hands.

But I believe Americans have a constitutional right to own firearms — responsibly, safely, within all laws.

And the practical truth is this: Master plan or no master plan, the feds can’t confiscate every American’s guns. “Logistical nightmare” is an understatement.

Southwest Virginia alone contains enough civilian shooting weapons to equip a national-level army. If the feds came knocking on every armed household’s front door, we’d soon be fighting Civil War, Part Two.

What, then, can be done? What should be done?

Consider this:

• Several states have adopted “red flag” laws, under which loved ones petition a court to keep guns away from people who send clear danger signals of suicide or homicide.

Gun enthusiasts have challenged these laws as violations of Second Amendment rights. Certainly, there is potential for the laws to be abused against someone who does not pose a credible threat.

Nevertheless — if we suspect someone will use a gun to harm innocent people, that person should be kept away from guns. This is one tool, and any tool can be refined.

By the way: In February, the National Rifle Association praised the House of Delegates for voting 52-47 — including the coalfields delegation — to eliminate Virginia’s red flag law. A Senate committee put a stop to that effort.

• Gun rights advocates often say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Indeed. People kill people. With guns, they kill people with unspeakable efficiency. Day after day, we’re hammered with new examples of people efficiently murdering fellow human beings who did nothing wrong.

If we agree such people should not possess guns, surely we can agree on this: To buy a gun, a person ought to pass a test — verification they have not committed violent felonies or taken other past actions that stand as blazing red danger flags.

Responsible gun owners — that’s several thousands of us and our neighbors — have nothing to fear from a background check to establish you can own them safely.

A national gun purchase background check process won’t catch all the potential killers and maimers. Some troubled souls don’t show enough to tip us off before it’s too late. But a national background check would do one hell of a lot more than happens now.

It would have to be national. It’s too easy to buy a gun, cross a state line and commit a crime.

A national background check also wouldn’t catch all the do-it-yourself “ghost gun” kits, the firearms traded between friends or the illegal guns already floating among the bad guys.

But it would be something more than happens now.

That will require more federal dollars. Members of Congress who rail against federal spending will have to step up or be shown unwilling to do the right thing.

• We must commit more resources to behavioral health care across the board, from local community services to state care facilities and beyond. Too many Americans suffer and don’t get the care, the intervention, they need. If we do more to help them, we prevent more tragedies.

That will require more federal dollars. Seeing as how this nation faces a mental wellness crisis, members of Congress who balk at investing to improve behavioral health should be ashamed.

• We have to do more to secure schools.

Southwest Virginia parents and students are accustomed to the presence of school resource officers. They are law enforcement professionals, assigned from local sheriff’s or police departments. The best of them are welcome faces and role models for our kids.

But the Uvalde killer managed to get past security, barricade himself in a classroom and fight off police for long, terrible minutes before being stopped.

It ought to be harder for someone walking off the street to enter a school. Unfortunately for students, parents and staff, that might mean reinforcing the main entrance as most courthouses have done — visitors are greeted by an officer, they empty their pockets and they walk through a metal detector.

That too would require federal dollars to help cash-strapped local school boards.

Members of Congress who balk at the spending have children of their own. Surely they don’t want their town to become the next Uvalde.