Last month, the Diocese of Memphis announced it would cease operations of Jubilee Catholic Schools, a network serving more than 1,400 of the city’s disadvantaged students. Jubilee had become financially unsustainable. The diocese didn’t have the money to keep the schools afloat, and the low-income families they served couldn’t pay the tuition necessary to cover the gap.

Although many grieved the loss, those who follow urban Catholic schooling have become mostly inured to such stories. Inner-city Catholic schools have been closing for decades, a consequence of a combination of challenges including changing urban demographics; fewer priests, brothers and nuns; the competition from charter schools; and more.

But the news of Jubilee’s demise was especially poignant. This was not supposed to happen.

A decade ago, President George W. Bush convened the White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools, a conference designed to call attention to the continuous loss of nonpublic schools in cities. A subsequent White House report would detail that in the prior six years alone, “the faith-based urban schools sector has suffered a net loss of 1,162 schools and 424,976 students.”

These schools had given families options and were often cornerstones of their neighborhoods. A considerable body of research had shown that Catholic schools in particular seemed to have an unusual ability to help high-need kids. The slow hemorrhage of this sector of schools was a loss for families, communities and, therefore, the nation.

In his speech, President Bush called attention to a number of promising stories showing that the right blend of policies, philanthropy and social entrepreneurialism could help preserve faith-based urban education.

Jubilee was one of these examples.

The president hailed the donors who contributed $15 million to launch and support the network. He noted its public, not just religious, service, pointing out that “81 percent of these children are not Catholic; nearly 96 percent live at or below the poverty level.”

A decade on, the fairy tale – a set of Memphis schools closed for decades then resurrected then shuttered again – reads more like another act in a long tragedy. According to data compiled by the National Catholic Educational Association, half of the nation’s Catholic schools have closed since 1960 (12,893 down to 6,429). Only 508 inner-city elementary Catholic schools remain. National Center for Education Statistics data show that, from 2005–6 through 2015–6, faith-based schools in cities lost 115,000 students in enrollment, with losses in the number of city-based Catholic, Conservative Christian and other schools affiliated with a particular faith (though there was an increase in the number of “unaffiliated” religious schools in cities).

We should remember that such longstanding schools are part of their communities’ histories. Many have existed for generations; some for more than a century. They pass on culture and values. If they disappear, our K-12 system’s diversity is diminished, and families lose valuable options. One important recent study found that the closure of longstanding urban Catholic schools actually harms, in terms of a number of social factors, their surrounding neighborhoods.

One response is that this phenomenon, no matter how painful, is simply the market talking: Families are choosing other schools. Advocates, however, counter that the “market” is inequitable. District-run public schools have students assigned to them and receive government funding. Charter schools also receive public dollars. Urban Catholic schools must rely on tuition and donations. When low-income families choose from a range of options, schools that charge are disadvantaged.

Private-school-choice programs like voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs, which provide financial aid that enables some families to afford a nonpublic school, haven’t yet been adopted at a scale to stem the tide of closures. While there is not a conclusive body of research on how these programs influence the supply of private-school options, there is some evidence that the right types of programs in the right conditions might help. For example, Michael McShane has written on this website that strategies related to funding, access to educators and information for families could help existing private schools grow enrollment and promote the creation of new schools.

There remains light on the horizon. After the Jubilee story broke, two of Catholic education’s most energetic leaders, Kathleen Porter-Magee and Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, wrote independently about the implications of news. Though they came to different conclusions about the advisability of replacing the Catholic schools with charters, Porter-Magee and Saroki de Garcia share one important thing: Both lead Catholic-school organizations that didn’t exist at the time of President Bush’s call to action.

They lead novel, entrepreneurial, nonprofit school networks that exist outside of the traditional Catholic school structure. Their organizations (Partnership Schools and
Seton Education Partners), and others like Cristo Rey and the University of Notre Dame’s ACE Academies, are colloquially known as private school management organizations. There’s variation among these networks, but their commonality is key: They are experimenting with key elements of school operations (e.g. management, governance, funding) to find ways to run high-performing, financially sustainable schools. These efforts are being fostered by a range of donors, including the Drexel Fund, a “venture philanthropy” committed to growing successful faith-based and other private schools.

Such innovation is encouraging. But advocates of faith-based schooling and urban educational options must be clear-eyed. George W. Bush wasn’t the first president to call attention to this problem. In 1970, President Richard Nixon created the “Panel on Nonpublic Education” to study the then-newly recognized threat facing these schools. Its 1972 report issued a stark warning: “The next few years are critical to the future of pluralism in education. Whatever is done must be undertaken with a profound sense of urgency.” The post-summit report issued by the Bush administration cited that language and concluded, “Now, nearly four decades later, with faith-based urban schools imperiled and closing at a rapid rate, the national call for urgency is as resonant as ever.”

A decade later, that risk remains.

The Parkland shooting has galvanized people across the country to demand that elected officials do something about gun violence besides just think and pray about it.

The signs aren’t promising. Can anything be done? Sure – but probably not by politicians.

Governments everywhere are growing in impotence due to a host of tectonic global shifts, while the world is polarizing into two increasingly-hostile tribes with very different orientations toward territory, tradition and force. A declining minority of Americans – roughly, Republicans – owns guns, while only about 3 percent possess the lion’s share of high-powered firearms. But that 3 percent constitute the only people our Luddite governing party of extractive economics and politics cares about.

Ultimately, they – not the majority of Americans who favor background checks, assault weapons bans, and the like – set the nation’s policy on guns, as on virtually all issues. Thus, not surprisingly, mere days after the massacre at their school, students from Parkland watched from the gallery as their state legislature voted down holding any debate whatsoever on assault weapons this year. There almost certainly will be no meaningful government action against gun violence.

Gun proponents argue that their position is protected by the Second Amendment “right to bear arms.” Whether or not the Constitution indeed provides an unlimited right to own, say, intercontinental ballistic missiles (which the Free Dictionary cites as an example of “arms”), however, limits on government as a solution do not imply the total lack of any solutions. The First Amendment’s assurance of “no law” abridging freedom of speech, for instance, is more absolute than the Second, with its qualifying language about “well-regulated militia”: You have a constitutional right to approach anyone on the street and, in the foulest language, tell them they deserve to be assaulted or killed.

Yet hardly any of us choose to exercise that right – except, of course, the current president, who does so at most of his rallies – because we know it’s wrong. Abusive speech was fairly rare in this country until recently, not because it was illegal, but because we had a culture that sufficiently stigmatized it. There’s a difference between what you have a right to do, and what’s right to do.

It is the latter – a question of what kind of society, not what kind of government, we want – to which we ought to be paying more attention. As I wrote here after the previous mass shooting, we don’t have a culture of violence in America because of our lax gun laws: We have lax gun laws because we live in a culture that actively supports gun violence. That’s what needs to – and can – be changed first.

As Krishnadev Calamur noted in The Atlantic post-Parkland, Switzerland is the only country in the world to rival ours in both the level of firearms possession (and then, not all that closely) and the looseness of its gun laws – yet, the Swiss haven’t experienced a single mass shooting since 2001. Why the difference? The Swiss have a “culture of responsibility and safety”; the U.S., not so much. Of course, there is one segment of American society with the heaviest concentrations of guns, yet virtually no shootings: the military. The culture there – contrary to what gun proponents now urge upon civilian streets and schools – is to heavily regulate their use and not carry them around everywhere (you know, kinda like the actual wording in the Constitution). Very simply, safe societies, though they may have guns, don’t glorify and fetishize them.

Legal codes more often codify than change the status quo. A previous generation of young Americans ended a war and ushered in an era of greater tolerance by changing society more than by changing politicians. That’s where attention needs to be focused.

Conservatives have long used commercial pressure against stores that sell dirty magazines or, say, sports leagues whose players express non-conservative views, the First Amendment notwithstanding. Despite the Second Amendment, the majority of Americans who want to stem the rising tide of guns washing over this country can do the same: Launching boycotts against sporting goods stores and others like Walmart that pump firearms into their communities. Or movies that glorify their use. Or advertisers that support such movies or TV shows, or manufacturers that sell their products through outlets that also sell guns.

Those who invest in the stock market can insist that mutual funds take their monies out of gun stocks, and anyone with a pension fund – especially the millions of school teachers in this country – can demand their funds do the same. Since Congress outlandishly prohibits public funding of research on reducing gun violence (unlike, say, reducing automobile deaths, on which we’ve made dramatic progress without taking away cars), private efforts can do so – something all those profitable insurance companies ought to be reminded of.

Successful community programs around the country have asked parents to allow voluntary searches of troubled children’s rooms by school and police officials, short-circuiting would-be Columbines and Parklands. Most shooters make their intentions known, increasingly on social media; this makes all of us, not just the government, monitors of such warnings. 39 state legislatures – you know, those folks who think children need more rather than fewer guns to be safe – prohibit guns in their own buildings; every business and home owners can make clear if they feel the same way about their own properties: As nonviolence movements around the world have demonstrated, the more people exhibit their views through simple statements like colored signs, the more others join in, until the instruments of moral force overwhelm the weapons of physical force.

Every American should rightfully be able to choose to defend his or her home
with arms if necessary (despite the evidence that a gun only makes its owner less safe). But in most communities across this country stockpiling and brandishing military-grade weaponry doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a danger. We don’t need the government to make that socially and economically unacceptable.

Roughly 13,000 Americans are killed by a gun in a homicide every year (this does not include the more than 20,000 Americans who commit suicide using a gun every year).

Let’s put that in perspective.

During the deadliest year for Americans of the Vietnam War in 1968, 16,899 Americans died.

During the Korean War, roughly 12,000 Americans died each year.

Those foreign wars consumed the U.S. government and the country. Today, the war Americans are fighting at home against gun violence is being ignored by our leaders, who seem to believe they can get by with doing nothing.

The massacre of children in Parkland, Florida, was but the latest horrific battle in this war, which claims an average of 96 Americans every day (combining gun homicides and suicides).

I am not an expert on gun violence, but I have spent my career working on national security. When America is losing its people to violent deaths at these rates abroad, it is always a war.

When Americans are being killed violently in this manner, the entire U.S. national security apparatus – National Security Council, State Department, Defense Department, intelligence agencies and more – is consumed at the highest levels with a comprehensive effort to stop the deaths. Principals Committee meetings (meetings of the national security agency cabinet heads) and the National Security Council (Principals Committee meetings plus the president) are convened regularly. Supplemental budget requests are made to Congress to urgently fund efforts to hasten the end of the conflict.

And yet, faced with the gun war here at home, the U.S. government repeatedly fails to even pay attention. Congressional Republicans cannot make time to debate the issue, and congressional leadership ignores pleas from colleagues to act. The Trump administration acts as though there is nothing it can do. Save for a minority, those who were elected and appointed to first and foremost protect the American people offer prayers and excuses as to why now is somehow not the time to discuss the policy implications of the latest massacre. The result is that the national consciousness forgets the war at home.

The media fails us on this issue too. During foreign wars, if an average of 96 Americans were dying violent deaths daily, it would be the number one news story in every major media outlet on a daily basis. One would not be able to escape the gruesome images and discussions of the violence on TV, on the internet or in newspapers. It would be pervasive, as it was during the height of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

But apparently, like our supposed leaders, the media has become numb to the war at home as well. It does not take long these days for the media to move on from the latest school massacre, and to rush past news of the regular local homicides by gun.

When America fights wars overseas, one of the obviously major challenges is that the governments of the countries in which the United States is fighting are not in control – America attempts to gain control with its allies by force. If in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or any other war zone the United States government controlled the use of force – as it does in the United States – it would immediately impose stricter gun laws. It’s a no brainer.

A 2016 study by the Center for American Progress (where I work) found that, “Despite the many factors that may contribute to rates of gun violence in a particular community, there is a robust and growing body of research that demonstrates an undeniable correlation between certain strong gun laws and lower rates of gun violence.” For example, “Two studies led by Daniel Webster at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health demonstrated the impact of state laws requiring a permit – and background check – before an individual can purchase a handgun. When Connecticut implemented this requirement, gun-related homicides in the state fell 40 percent; when Missouri eliminated this requirement, gun homicides increased 26 percent.”

Looking at America’s epidemic of gun violence through a national security lens, there is no question that we are at war. And there is clearly a simple set of solutions available to drastically reduce deaths by guns. This is why America’s gun violence is so perplexing – why has the United States not imposed stricter gun laws to stop the violence?

America’s leaders who do not act to strengthen gun laws are guilty of a dereliction of duty. Those officials are actively undermining U.S. national security and perpetuating a war at home. They are allowing their own citizens to be slaughtered daily at rates only seen in some of America’s bloodiest wars.

To be filed under the heading of things you won’t hear anyone in the Pentagon say: “Less is more.” Because when it comes to spending on Department of Defense priorities, more is always more but somehow never quite enough.

The recently enacted Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 established how badly lawmakers and the White House were going to bust the budget caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011 – $300 billion it turns out. Much of it went to the Pentagon, which sounds like too much.

The biggest slice of the Pentagon budget pie goes to operations and maintenance. If you cast your mind back to the president’s budget request for Pentagon operations and maintenance spending in fiscal year 2018, you find a total request of $223.5 billion. In the grand compromise passed a few weeks ago, this line item jumped to nearly $282 billion – a more than 25 percent increase. And, astonishingly, the secretary of the Army is now floating a trial balloon asking Congress for additional time to spend the Army’s portion of the operations and maintenance slice of the pie ($67.6 billion). Because Congress abdicated its responsibility to fund the government in a timely manner, Secretary Mark Esper is saying he might not have enough time to spend all the additional largesse. The original request for Army operations account for fiscal year 2018 was just over $49 billion.

Why would the Army secretary ask for extra time to spend just this particular money? Well, not all dollars are treated the same at the Pentagon. Because of the immediacy of spending on items in the operations and maintenance budget, Congress requires the Pentagon to spend all that money in the same fiscal year for which it was appropriated. On the other hand, the Pentagon has two years to spend research and development funds, three years to spend procurement dollars (except shipbuilding), and five years to spend the cash appropriated for military construction and shipbuilding.

So Esper would like to have more time to spend his additional approximately $18 billion. I agree that haste makes waste and more time may lead to more thoughtful decisions, but the real question is: Why didn’t the Pentagon have a plan for spending this additional money? The answer seems to be that Congress is shoveling money across the river to the Pentagon with no real plan on how to spend it. And that’s not a fiscally sound way to make spending decisions. The topline budget numbers set in the Bipartisan Budget Act were apparently based on politics and not based on need, priorities or the requests of the agencies receiving the funds.

But here’s the kicker. The budget deal didn’t write the dozen spending bills that fund the government. It just set top line funding levels. The country is operating under its fifth continuing resolution to keep government funded at fiscal year 2017 levels since the new fiscal year started on Oct. 1. The appropriations committees in the House and Senate are scrambling to write the bills before the March 23 expiration of the current extension. That also means that they can adjust the Army operations and maintenance funds to the amount they can reasonably spend in fiscal year 2018, because in a few short months, Congress will have to turn to fiscal year 2019, where the Army’s operational budget needs can be appropriately funded.

Congress has a few options of how to respond to Esper’s request. First, Congress could ask the secretary just how much the Army does need to spend on operations in the remainder of fiscal year 2018 and adjust appropriated funds downward based on that response. That would certainly be the most logical and fiscally responsible thing to do. Or Congress could grant his request to convert the funds into multi-year money.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect Congress to take the most logical and fiscally responsible route. If Esper receives a warm reception to this request, watch for the other service secretaries to make the same request. And one more element of fiscal discipline flies out the window.