Colorado politics put school children at risk
It isn’t easy holding elected office. That is true from the governor’s mansion and down to your local school board. Given the way that schools have become politicized, it is probably harder to be on the school board. We’ve been worried about keeping our children safe at school for as long as we’ve had schools. Now, some Colorado legislators want to undo a lot of that. Let’s look at the political landscape and see how politics today are risking the lives of Colorado’s school children. Why would politicians put our children at risk, and why would we put up with it?
Start by thinking back to 25 years ago. Colorado shocked the nation when two murdering sociopaths killed school children at Columbine High School. For the past two decades, Colorado laws let trained and vetted volunteer school staff defend their schools. The reason for those armed volunteers was obvious; something was better than nothing. There were lots of times when children were on campus without an armed defender. Some campuses didn’t have a school resource officer. Volunteer school staff filled in the gaps.
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In every Colorado school that used it, that program of trained volunteer defenders worked perfectly to deter mass murderers. There were no accidents and no attacks. Now, Colorado politicians want to outlaw armed school staff and leave children at risk. Politics tells us why.
Suppose you’re a school official. Other districts have armed law enforcement officers on campus. That is expensive. It is also politically difficult for you to have uniformed officers on your campus. Other districts have trained and vetted school volunteers who arm themselves on campus to deter attacks. Despite their perfect record of safety and effectiveness, you don’t want to allow armed volunteers on your campuses for political reasons. At the same time, you also don’t want to be blamed when a mass murderer decides to kill the children in the schools you’ve left disarmed and helpless. Maybe a senior politician can make this problem go away for you.
Colorado Democrats recently proposed making kindergarten through high school campuses into “sensitive places” where guns are outlawed. We already know that violent criminals ignore those laws. That means the new regulations would outlaw those honest armed volunteers at school. That certainly looks like a dangerous plan.
Maybe politics is simpler than the political pressures on a school board. Maybe we’re simply seeing Colorado legislators taking money from anti-gun billionaires. Maybe it is both.
We might have explained the politics behind Colorado’s proposed gun ban. It doesn’t explain why some voters would reject a low-cost program that’s worked perfectly across the country for decades to keep kids safe in schools.
Why would we accept such a bad plan?
Political claims are always easier than actions. Politicians often seek credit for what they say rather than what they actually accomplish. Few voters read past the headlines and politicians routinely put a rosy label on horrible bills. Still, fewer voters read the entire press release and do some independent research by actually reading the bill. It is sad to say that news reporters aren’t much better. Colorado Democrats can claim that disarming the defenders at school makes our children safer. That lets the voters breathe easier even though it denies the real risk of narcissistic mass murderers killing the kids. When there is an attack at school, the politicians can say they passed a bill and solved the problem, even if that claim isn’t true.
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Politicians get credit for simply saying the problem went away. Note that politicians still have armed security guards.
It is easier to slant a story when voters are uninformed. Most voters don’t know that their neighbors use a firearm in armed defense several thousand times a day. They don’t know that one out of every 12 adults are legally armed in public. The public is never told that we already have 23-thousand firearms regulations, yet criminals still get guns and commit violent crimes. The voters were never told that experts suggest that school resource officers need help from armed staff to stop mass murderers at school. The voters never learn the facts if all they know is what they see on television.
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It is always easy to sell fear. A politician can get votes by saying we’re safer if our neighbors are disarmed. Some people fear their neighbors and would be happy to disarm all law-abiding citizens. Maybe some of the school board members fear their neighbors, too. I’ve always found it odd that some people want to take our neighbor’s guns but they leave our neighbors with cars that are thousands of times more powerful than firearms. Your child is much more likely to be injured in the school parking lot than to be killed at school by a mass murderer.
The Democrat party has become the party of gun control. It is easy for low-level politicians to toe the party line. They don’t have to defend their political position or explain their decisions to their friends. And the liberals who do arm themselves seem to stay quiet about it.
Mass murderers follow their own rules, and they get a say in what happens. Armed school staff have a perfect record for a reason. Some of them have stopped attacks at their schools. Many more of them have diverted attacks to easier targets. The bill to disarm all school campuses lets mass murderers choose any campus rather than focusing the murderers onto the campuses that chose to go disarmed.
Change is hard. Once we listen to them, it looks like we’ve voted ideologues into office. They define themselves with a particular political point of view. Because of this conflation of self with belief, they don’t know who they are if those beliefs are questioned. In other words, challenging an idea, a belief, or an assumption is tantamount to challenging the person. That makes it extremely hard for politicians to see evidence that calls their views into question. It is always easier to write another ineffective law than to question the world around us or question ourselves. Many of us pretend that all we need is more legislation, more ink on paper, to stop violent narcissists from targeting our kids.
What if we can’t label the problem without offending someone? Many of the recent mass murderers are in a politically protected class. We saw some people with untreated mental illness commit public violence. That is rare, but it happens. More recently, we’ve seen mass murder attempted by political and sociological ideologues. We saw murderers who wanted to kill their political opponents or who wanted to kill recent immigrants. We’ve seen recent mass murderers who want to kill anyone who questions their status as a victim due to their sexual orientation.
Reality is complicated. There are lots of political and psychological forces at play with any legislation. We want to make sure we do no harm when we make changes in how we protect our children. We’ve been thinking about protecting our children for a very long time. We’ve developed systems that work. We have every right to question someone who throws those efforts away. Let’s not roll back the quantifiably valid efforts we presently have in exchange for policies that will endanger our children even more.
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