Gun laws only work when you have the officers and personnel needed to enforce them.
NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal knows this probably better than anyone in the sports and entertainment world. After all, he is an honorary police officer who’s running for sheriff in Henry County, Ga., in 2020.
In an interview with WABC radio this week, O’Neal believes that the only way to make schools safer is to appropriate more funds for law enforcement to hire more officers to place at schools, not ban guns.
“The government should give law enforcement more money,” O’Neal said on Wednesday. “Give more money, you recruit more people, and the guys that are not ready to go on the streets, you put them in front of the schools. You put ’em in front of the schools, you put ’em behind the schools, you put ’em inside the schools, and we need to pass information. […] I would like to see police officers in schools, inner cities, private schools.”
He continued to say that any ban on guns would be counterproductive, as it would only enable illegal gun purchases via the black market.
“There’s a lot of those weapons already on the streets,” O’Neal explained. “So it’s not like, if you say, ‘OK, these weapons are banned,’ people are gonna go, ‘Oh man, let me turn it in.’ That’s definitely not going to happen. Once you ban ’em, now they’re going to become a collector’s item and you’re going to have people underground, and they were $2,000. […] I’ll give you $9,000 for that gun. So, you know, we just need to keep our eyes open.”
Students around the country took part in National Walkout Day on Wednesday to demand stricter gun laws, which also marked one month since the Parkland shooting that left 17 people dead. But gun laws only take you so far — you also need competent and well-trained law enforcement to enforce existing gun laws and protect the communities they’re serving.
In the case of Parkland, the FBI and the Broward County sheriff’s office missed all the red flags, warnings, and tips about the shooter leading up to the massacre. And poorly-timed miscommunication between dispatchers and the school police officer Scot Peterson resulted in a delayed response to stop the shooter.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Law enforcement messed up. But every department handles threats differently. Around the same time as the Parkland shooting, a teenage student in the Washington suburb of Clarksburg, Md., was reported to police after a school resource officer found a handgun in his backpack. After searching his home, police found “an AR-15 style rifle, a shotgun, two handguns, ammunition, a tactical vest, a detonator for landmines, and a list of grievances against other students and the school.”
So, while celebrities, athletes, and entertainers boast about how much they want to reduce gun violence without any real or practical proposal, take heed of the wisdom of the former NBA great. Shaq appears to be one of a few who has any idea on how to actually save lives and protect the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
