It didn’t take long for people to start politicizing Marysville-Pilchuck tragedy

I’ve had 72 hours to process the horrible incident that happened Friday morning at Marysville-Pilchuck High School. There is simply no way to make sense of such horror. But from what I saw over the weekend, a lot of people sure seem to think they know the answers. They are liars and fools – because there are few issues that have more shades of gray than the gun issue.

It took just hours for despicable people to start politicizing the tragedy. Liberal Seattle activist Nick Hanauer apparently thought it would be funny to sarcastically post about the murder and maiming of several children. Hours after the shooting, Hanauer tweeted “We need more school shootings!!! Vote yes on Initiative 591.”

You see, Hanauer is actually against I-591. Hanauer spends every interview telling people how rich he is – and what a brilliant visionary he is – so I guess we just don’t understand the genius and hilarity of using the shooting to campaign against the initiative. You have to be on the intellectual level of a Nick Hanauer to see how clever that was.

A sponsor of our state’s background check initiative – I-594 – also moved quickly to use the shooting for polticial purposes. He quickly took to CNN to campaign for his initiative.

Of course, what these frauds fail to tell anyone is that the two initiatives in our state – one promoted by the gun-rights crowd, the other promoted by anti-gun people – would have had zero effect on the Marysville shootings.

The kid who was the shooter got his dad’s gun. A gun his dad had legally acquired. A background check initiative would not have kept this gun out of the kid’s hands.

But that brings me to the role of parents in this tragedy. And it is a significant role. First of all, any parent who does not lock up their weapons is an idiot, especially if you are the parent of teenage boys who have teenage boy friends coming over to house. To not lock up your guns is an act of unthinkable stupidity.

But should we mandate that guns be locked up? No.

What about the man or woman who doesn’t have kids and doesn’t want to lock up their gun? We can’t force them to do so. If they keep their gun in their nightstand and someone breaks into their house and then uses the gun in a crime, we can’t make a criminal out of the gun-owner burglary victim.

But again, any parent who does not lock up their gun is an idiot.

Also, as long as you’re paying for your kid’s cell phone and Internet access, demand that you have full access to all of your kid’s social media. I follow all three of my daughters on Twitter. When they were in high school, my wife and I told them that we would have access to all of their online activities as long as we were paying for it.

Now, kids can and do give their parents phony Facebook and Twitter accounts to follow – while they have a stealth account for their friends to see. But that wasn’t the case with the shooter. A simple Twitter search of his name on Friday afternoon revealed a really disturbed kid who retweeted a lot of graphic sexual stuff. Again, how can a parent not be aware and allow that from their 14-year-old kid?

One more point, after a generation of protecting our precious little snowflakes from every little problem in life, is it possible that we are raising a generation of kids who are completely ill-equipped to handle rejection of any kind? As one friend of mine said in an e-mail to me this morning, “many kids aren’t allowed to fail, feel rejection, feel pain from breakups etc….and when they do, they aren’t equipped to handle it. They don’t have coping mechanisms and aren’t as resilient as we were when we didn’t have helicopter parents, swooping in to fix every problem.”

I remember being rejected by a girl when I was 14. It hurt like heck. But I also grew up knowing that life wasn’t perfect and that life had a lot of painful bumps along the way. Parents who want to eliminate all pain from their kid’s lives might not be doing their children a favor.

So, what’s the solution? We could put metal detectors at every school and herd kids in like prison inmates. Short of that, there’s sadly not a lot we can do quickly to prevent school shootings. The real solution is far more complex because it is mostly abut parenting.

We should have a parent’s common sense – not laws – keeping guns out of kids’ hands. We need to monitor our kids’ online lives. We need to stop telling our kids that mommy and daddy will make life perfect and protect them from any pain. But you have to be their source of strength when they do feel pain.

We need to reject the horrible people who were putting on their drool bibs in their eagerness to use the death of children to promote or reject an initiative that wouldn’t have had any effect on this tragedy.

People want easy solutions. For this tragedy, there are none.