The evening after Wednesday’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Fox News host Sean Hannity proposed a “simple” solution that, in reality, would have done nothing to prevent the tragedy earlier that day.
“School shootings are preventable, and simple, basic, common-sense actions can mitigate these tragedies,” Hannity told his audience. “If we have the desire to stop school shootings, this is the first thing you should do: Every school in the country should have a metal detector. You have them at airports. You have them when you’re around elected politicians.”
It’s unclear what a metal detector would have done to prevent Wednesday’s shooting, in which the perpetrator opened fire from outside of the church, through its windows.
According to the Minneapolis police chief, “the gunman approached on the outside, on the side of the building, and began firing a rifle through the church windows towards the children sitting in the pews at the mass” inside.
Citing a parent who was in the church as the shooting took place, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that the “shooter opened fire outside the building with some kind of semiautomatic weapon.” The unnamed eyewitness said the perpetrator “just pepper-sprayed through the stained-glass windows into the building, 50 to 100 shots.”
Hannity went on to recommend controlling “the entry of kids and the perimeter around every school,” and placing armed retired servicemembers or law enforcement officers in schools.
“The left’s rush to immediately blame Republicans, race to blame guns, for every tragedy, it’s sad and pathetic, but it’s predictable,” the Fox host concluded—himself racing to blame anything but firearms for what took place Wednesday, to the point of espousing a woefully inadequate solution that could have never stopped it.