For all the complaints about Joe Biden’s supposed role in and responsibility for the campus protests, I’m still waiting for the protestors to say what they would do differently in a real world where there are no easy answers, each side makes both fair and unreasonable demands of the other, and give-and-take diplomacy is a requirement for a long-term solution that does not cater eventually to bad actors who ultimately would make a terrible situation even worse. There is no such thing as a coffee house presidency.

On another note, although I recently was accused of “hijacking” our discussion threads by occasionally going off-topic with my posts (despite being relevant to many of our other discussions in this forum) in deviating from what our Morning Shots hosts specifically choose to discuss for the day (or even link to, via “Catching up …”) within their limited space, I wish to share a story with you that I believe we all should consider. It is not reported here, or much of elsewhere, probably because relatively few have heard about it. It is about something that went right yesterday rather than horribly wrong.

In Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin there was not a mass shooting tragedy at a local middle school. It did not happen, because people did what they needed to do in order to prevent it. It did not happen because an armed male teenage student could not get into the school, because local citizens voted via referendum to spend more money in their district to upgrade security, particularly doors and locks, in order to prevent easy access to the building and its vestibules by outsiders. It did not happen because teachers and other personnel, as well as the children, put their active shooter training to good use, minimizing the threat by following established safety procedures both quickly and responsibly. And it did not happen because people outside the school, seeing something amiss and hearing rapid gunfire outside, quickly notified law enforcement, which with the benefit of its own extensive training neutralized the would-be killer before lives could be taken, while others sheltered those who in the interim had fled for safety.

There is much more to the story. The investigation is ongoing, and the school is closed today so that people can process their grief and seek help as needed for what almost went horribly wrong. But the upshot is that yesterday, all of the parents were able to welcome their children home, hold them a little tighter, and soothe their fears. For all of them there is a today and a tomorrow and a future to come. The event will leave scars upon the community. Healing will be needed. But at least they, and we all, were not subjected to more unnecessary human suffering, because everyone did what they had to do in order to ensure the safest possible outcome. Let us celebrate that small victory when all too often we hear about the terrible tragedies of gun violence that never seem to end.

apnews.com/article/wisc…