For those who have been on Mars for the last month or so, there was a march in DC over the weekend, with numerous smaller marches around the country, on gun issues. The reactions have been primarily emotional and political, but few people have focused on defining and solving the problems that supposedly were the basis for the marches in the first place.

I am a strong Second Amendment supporter, responsible gun owner, NRA member, and active participant in shooting sports. I am also appalled at the level of gun violence in the country, am not a Second Amendment absolutist, and would support commonsense modifications that actually addressed the problems.

Those descriptions apply to millions of NRA members and concealed carry permit holders, and we are fed up with being cast as the bad guys and told that the solution is for law-abiding citizens to hand over our rights. We are not, as we are portrayed by the Connecticut governor, terrorists, nor do we have “blood on our hands” if we don’t toe the liberal line on gun control, as the teenage arbiters of wisdom from the weekend marches said.

We would love to see a reasoned debate about problems and solutions, but yet again, the Left has abided by its mantra of never letting a good crisis (however manufactured and nurtured) go to waste. The silly season has started (more below) and the prospects for actually accomplishing something are fading.

Maybe a good place to start is to identify what the problem is we’re actually trying to solve. In the immediate wake of the Florida school shooting, what took center stage was the “never again” mantra that clearly referred to taking steps to keep students safe at school. Some of the kids directly impacted eloquently and passionately went public with a combination of horror at witnessing what happened, fear at being in that situation again, mourning for those killed and their families, and a sincere wish that no one would have to experience a mass school shooting ever again. It was impossible not to be impressed with the kids and emotionally moved.

Parents also seemed more vocal this time, and a groundswell began to build. In my view, the main reason that concern over this particular shooting was getting traction was the failure of the many layers of government to protect the kids — everyone from the FBI to the local sheriff’s office to the school administrators to the officers who were on site but simply did not do their jobs. It’s only natural to wonder what should be done when government fails in its most basic function.

Now, it may not be politically correct to bring this up, but in spite of attempts by gun control advocates to skew the statistics, mass school shootings are extremely rare. The gun deaths in just the Orlando and Vegas shootings outnumbered those from all mass school shootings in the last 10 years, not to mention the overwhelming numbers of murders in Chicago.

Recall when Joe Biden opined that we should do whatever it took to address gun deaths because “if we could save only one life, it would be worth it”? Well, it may sound cold, but the fact is that life is a trade-off, and at some point the cost to “do whatever it takes” isn’t worth it. But if that point is conceded, it is not unreasonable to apply the same logic to mass school shootings.

When do we reach the point at which it isn’t worth it to do more? At the extremes, given the rarity, should we do anything more at all? Or should we employ 100 armed guards at each school with airport-like X-ray screeners and pat-downs of every student? Seems like the answer should be somewhere in the middle, but where exactly is a worthy debate.

It took only one guy with a bomb in his shoe to force millions of air travelers ever since to take off their shoes and put them through the scanner. So maybe “doing something more” on school safety is an issue whose time has come. Regardless of the statistical logic, kids seem genuinely traumatized by the prospects of school shootings. And if the “never again” movement had been the catalyst for a real debate on how best to prevent them, then the kids may have done us a great service. But unfortunately, thanks to the Left, that’s not where things have headed.

The initial rhetoric from the kids included lots of generalities — “enough,” “something must be done,” “we must act,” “we should not be afraid to go to class,” “the status quo is not an option” — and virtually no specifics that might actually address the problem. But rather than engage in a debate, the Left instead hijacked the very presentable, marketable Florida kids and turned the rhetoric into personal attacks and political sound bites, leading to the CNN town hall ambush in which an NRA representative and Sen. Marco Rubio were branded murderers or evil politicians with blood on their hands who cared more about campaign dollars than seeing kids get murdered.

By implication, NRA members were painted with the same brush, willing to see kids get killed to save their guns. Rubio was pressured to commit to take no funding from the NRA, which was somehow blamed for the shooting, and it became clear that the objective was to diminish the political clout of the NRA and keep alive a “gun” issue for the midterm elections at the expense of crafting real solutions.

Hollywood celebrities joined the fray, and a couple of the Florida kids were anointed the spokespeople for the movement, which by now had morphed into a political rally that stressed voting power and a goal to vote out any pol who wasn’t 100% behind their agenda, which at that point was still vague. A media tornado ensued with the kids appearing on every outlet 24/7. They were somehow held up as the unassailable voices on complex policy questions.

The rhetoric became increasingly vulgar and harsh, with the poster child generating the biggest betting game on this side of March Madness, namely the over/under on how many F-bombs he could drop in any 10-minute media event. Hardly the best vehicle for a sober discussion, but the kids are catnip to the media.

Then the “march,” titled “March for our Lives,” began to take shape. It was very cleverly branded since it was also becoming apparent that if the march were limited only to school safety, it would severely undercut the media theme that it was this generation’s equivalent of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War protests.

As anyone like me who witnessed these firsthand can tell you, these were historic movements that had huge impacts on society and policy. And trying to put them in the same category as very rare mass school shootings is absurd. Furthermore, the faces of the march weren’t nearly as diverse as would be needed to make a broader political statement. They were all from upper middle class, ethnically homogeneous Broward County, Florida.

So as the day of the march approached, the theme shifted to the broader issue of gun violence, with more specific demands such as banning “assault weapons” (even though no one in the march seemed to know what those were), limiting magazine capacity, extended waiting periods, and universal background checks. Speakers were even imported from Chicago to include random gun violence that was taking the lives of innocent 10-year olds.

But the bulk of the march was still geared toward political rants from teenagers and the threat to vote out anyone not fully onboard with their agenda. Missing were any solutions to gun violence in general, which would have concentrated on suicide prevention and gang murders in a half-dozen Democrat-controlled cities that account for about 85% of all gun deaths.

The proposals would do virtually zero to prevent mass school shootings. The media was no help in trying to reach solutions. The kids were worshipped as true revolutionaries and given unlimited media platforms, with no air time given to the many kids from the same Florida area that also deplored gun violence but had radically different solutions, like having armed guards in schools and expanding mental health services..

The media also virtually ignored another school shooting the week before the march in which an armed guard had prevented a shooter from killing more than the one target he had come to the school after. The New York Times headline read, “Student killed after shooting girl,16, at Maryland school.” You had to read well into the article before you found out that the armed guard had confronted the shooter and stopped him from doing far more damage.

There was even a multi-paragraph debate about whether the guard had shot and killed the shooter or if the shooter had committed suicide when confronted — as if that made any difference in the key takeaway, namely that the presence of an armed guard had stopped the threat. Anything that didn’t fit the agenda was buried.

And then the Left piled on with recommendations that bordered on the inane: More “gun-free zone” signs, supplies of rocks in each classroom to fight armed intruders in a Pennsylvania school district, legislation in New Jersey to impose a “good reason” criterion on gun permit applications, and legislation to require background checks for ammunition purchases. I might be tempted to support the last one and then have every one of the roughly 75 million gun owners go to the store and try to buy a 50-round box every day. It would be interesting to see how an FBI responsible for those background checks might react.

All of these proposals are designed to highlight the gun issue for political purposes, not seek solutions that have any chance of making a difference.

And then came the center piece — the op-ed from former Justice John Paul Stevens, who recommended the “simple” repeal of the Second Amendment as the key to stopping gun violence. I suspect this is just simmering rage from an old man still bitter about being on the wrong side of Heller. Of course, this is a non-starter, but the Left and the media loved it because it keeps the issue front and center and rallies the far-left base.

Ironically, it’s also the best advertisement for the NRA position that the advocates of gun control are really looking to confiscate all guns. And like many of the Left’s proposals on guns, it’s likely to backfire by energizing and validating its opposition. NRA donations have soared. Where that usually winds up is in a rhetorical shouting match that polarizes opinion and makes commonsense debate on the issues impossible.

The Left will keep pushing, but politically, the endgame is a jump ball. The Left has not been bashful in describing these events as being part of a political exercise to regain control of the House. Results on school safety or gun violence are taking a back seat to politics, and that’s too bad. There was even an article from a major Democrat consultant essentially advising that risking losing Senate seats held by Democrats in red states won by Trump was worth it to target 40 to 50 swing House districts with seats held by Republicans. Apparently, getting a House majority that paves the way for an impeachment vote is worth losing the Senate.

It’s all about Trump and diminishing the political clout of the NRA along the way. But relying on the kids to vote has never been a winning gambit, and hyping the anti-gun, anti-NRA rhetoric, along with vile personal attacks that try to equate NRA/Second Amendment support with evil itself, runs the risk of a massive backlash. Still, the prospect of toppling Trump is apparently worth the dice roll, which is truly sad since there is no way that this strategy can lead to any reasonable compromise on actions that could enhance school safety.

So what should be done? Maybe we should take a cue from what the father of one of the Florida victims did. I don’t understand where he got the strength, but he has dedicated himself to addressing the school safety issue. First, he narrowed the issue to “school safety,” not “gun violence,” and worked with the Florida legislature to enact measures that focused on safety, without unduly compromising Second Amendment rights.

The state passed a bill in record time that had several commonsense provisions that could actually help prevent school shootings — expanded mental health services and modified regulations to make it easier to get help for troubled kids, red flag provisions that make it easier to prevent disturbed kids from getting guns or taking them away, funding to arm school personnel and other school security measures. He is now looking to take that model to other states.

I don’t agree with all of these provisions, and the NRA is suing to block the age restriction part, but most make sense. I am all for universal background checks and banning any device that can turn rifles into automatic weapons. And while I’m not a big fan of arming large numbers of teachers, I support having some who have serious training and expertise with guns. And as a deterrent effect, that fact should be widely publicized as a replacement for the gun-free zone signs.

To broaden the issue to gun violence, as the “march” tried to do at the last minute, the focus should be first on the main causes of gun deaths — suicide, which accounts for about two-thirds — and gang-related murders, which add another 12-15%. The latter is concentrated in a small number of Democrat-controlled cities that have some of the strictest gun restrictions in the country and don’t vigorously enforce existing gun laws.

The former would be helped by better mental health services, modifications to medical privacy laws, and red flag rules. An all-hands-on-deck approach to eliminating gang violence using existing law would also be at the top of the list. And when we finish with that, we can address the societal issues of single-parent families, lack of personal responsibility teaching, glorification of violence by the media/entertainment industries, and the decline of the influence of morality and religion.

But first, can we at least ask the Left to stop the cynical use of gun issues as political fodder and engage in an adult debate about how to effectively address real problems?