No matter Mitt Romney’s virtues as a human being, the comments he made in the aftermath of the mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, should solidify, at least for all of us who vigorously opposed Romney’s candidacy in the 2012 GOP primary, the reasons why we do not need Mitt Romney in a leadership position in the GOP.

Romney lingered longer on one issue: school shootings. He was originally scheduled to announce his bid Thursday but pushed it back “out of respect for the victims and their families” after a gunman killed 17 people at a Florida high school.

He encouraged states to consider solutions like building security, police patrols and intervention teams. He also said he would back a measure to bolster the federal database for firearms background checks.

“I think we can’t just sit and wait and hope for things to get better,” he said. “It is wrong and unacceptable for children in our schools to fear for their lives.”

People who feel we have to “do something” terrify me because the impulse to “do something” rapidly overrides any value of the “something.”

A quick look at the Florida shooting shows that “bolstering the federal database for background checks” would have had no effect whatsoever. The building, like virtually every other school in the country, had a security system. The shooter had been identified as a potential risk. He had been expelled from school. He had been reported to the local authorities and the FBI. I don’t know what more “intervention” you need.

No less than 4 state/local government agencies knew Parkland shooter was "in crisis" & posed "danger to himself & others" after cutting himself on Snapchat a year before massacre.
That's in addition to ignored FBI tip.https://t.co/5JnXNkKipP pic.twitter.com/REKZeOInR7

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) February 17, 2018

If local and federal authorities don’t accept the risk as being worth their time or effort to investigate, that is not a gun control problem.

Romney is a technocrat. He views problems as something to be fixed. That’s fine. If you are an agency administrator, or cabinet secretary, or Supreme Galactic Warlord. He’s not a politician. If you doubt my word on that, look at the state of the Massachusetts GOP on the eve of Mitt Romney’s election as governor and compare it to that same party the day after Mitt Romney left office. When he ran against Barack Obama it was clear that he simply did not have the instincts necessary to function in a 100% political environment. In fact, he was much more focused on not doing or saying anything that could be taken as “racist” than he was on winning. When you let the corpulent Candy Crowley hand you your ass in a presidential debate, you have exhibited that you deserve to lose.

The problem we are facing is not one that can be cured by more laws. It is particularly not a problem that is going to be solved by depriving law abiding citizens of their constitutional rights–or increasing the scope and reach of an already oppressive federal bureaucracy–because we feel we have to “do something.”

Make no mistake about it. Utah is sending another Susan Collins to the Senate, not another Mike Lee.