By: Michael Aun

On cue, like roaches crawling out of the woodwork in the darkness of night, the right- and left-wing demagogues emerged on television literally as innocent children and teachers were dying on the floors of a fourth-grade classroom in Uvalde, Texas.

Shame on us all! Shame on the networks and cable outlets for leading with sensationalism and melodrama… instead of information.

Shame on the biased anchors that used this tragedy to further their own political agendas, be they right or left leaning.

Shame on America for tolerating this! We tune in to learn about the news. Instead, we get the agenda from the source and whatever they espouse, facts notwithstanding.

Anger and rage surface while the tragedy itself is moved to the back burner. To expect the idiots in Washington to address this issue is even more exasperating and infuriating.

Look at the facts. There are nearly as many guns as there are people in the United States today. If gunmakers never produced another weapon, it would not remove the millions already on the streets. We are already too late.

Doing nothing seems to be the way Congress likes to deal with every other issue. Why should this be any different? Demagogues like Beto O’Rourke be damned for their firebrand of agitation, playing to the crowd with a manipulative slant in one direction or the other.

These Machiavellian exploiters are little more than spin doctors and propagandists. Real solutions require real compromise and that will never happen until reasonable people meet in the middle to accommodate the masses.

What should anger the left more are the senseless number of unnamed, faceless people who die every day on the lawless streets of every big city in America.

What should anger the right more is not the constitutional rights they proudly defend but the innocent people who are slaughtered because we choose not to protect our most precious asset- America’s future, its children.

There can be only one reasonable solution to this mess. Since guns are legal, we need to step up and provide the proper defense for our children, particularly in our schools, the most sacred of chambers.

Parents need to step up and demand more from their elected representatives so that, no matter the costs, more needs to be done to protect those whose lives are at stake.

There are no perfect solutions to this imperfect dilemma in which we find ourselves today. Even if guns were illegal today, the millions already out there are enough to annihilate every man woman and child in America.

We can start with better protection of America’s primary wealth, its children. That means schools with more resource officers on the scene. It means plugging the holes in the system that allow for those to penetrate our schools at will.

It may also mean that we need to arm the defenders, the teachers and the folks who are there to protect the future of our children. Will such extreme measures save all the children? Of course not. We need to start somewhere.

We could start by taking our own border security more seriously. We could treat the sanctity of the classroom with the same vigilance that the legislators view their own safety.

We can and should do more to identify people who are troubled and get them the help they need before another child dies needlessly.

My best guess… the Congress will do what it has always done… run and hide from the issue. Shame on us all for having no backbone.

Michael Aun, CSP ®, CPAE ® Hall of Fame Speaker is the author of “The Great Communicators” (Royal Publishing)