The debate on school safety: Armed staff vs. gun-free zones

What should we do to protect our schools? We hear a flurry of sound bites from both sides of this debate.

Each side focuses on the narrow point that makes their case in the fewest words. There are good arguments that say fewer good people get shot once a good guy or gal is shooting at the murderer.

Another point of view says that it is better if the murderer never comes to your school or college in the first place.

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Unfortunately, that argument takes some serious twists and turns. Both arguments are right as they offer answers to different questions. What we should do depends entirely on who we want to help. Do we want to make students safer or do we want to feel better and turn away from the uncomfortable problem?

What they say isn’t what they do.

The debate about mass public violence doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Our elites solved this problem on their own. Celebrities have personal security for many reasons. Some people might hate what the celebrity said. Some might hate that the businessman is wealthy. Some people want to hurt a famous person simply to become notorious. For those reasons and more, rich people are targets. Our political elites and rich families live in walled compounds. They have chauffeurs and private jets. They have armed security for themselves and their family. The elites may say that ordinary people shouldn’t have guns, but what they do is something different. They go armed or buy their own protection.

What works for the rest of us?

What works for celebrities doesn’t work for most of us. We travel to our jobs. We go shopping for what we need. We drive our own cars or take public transportation. We worry about getting our kids to school every day and to church every week. Most of us send our children to public school or educate them at home. All of that changed in the last few decades.

We live in a new world.

We can talk to friends around the world. We also can feel left out and ignored by not only our friends, but by the entire world. We’ve seen people commit suicide to become a posthumous celebrity. We’ve seen murderers kill innocent children so that the murderer could get their name in the news. That desire for notoriety mushroomed with 24-7 news and with social media. Yes, the world has changed.

We’ve had firearms for four centuries. We’ve had mass media for about four decades. We are living in the middle of an unstable social experiment. Right now, we don’t know how to live with violent narcissists.

It is hard to protect everyone.

School officials did what any responsible adult would do. They asked the police to protect our kids from violent murderers. That is both more complex and harder than it sounds. Students are at school early and they stay late. They are vulnerable as they ride the bus and when they play after-school sports. Many schools are so large that it would take many officers to protect them.

School boards and school principals called the sheriff and police chief. Those officers told the truth and said they didn’t have the manpower to do the job. There is about one sworn law enforcement officer for every four-hundred people in the US. That isn’t enough to protect our schools even if the police stopped doing everything else they do. Fortunately, both sides wanted to protect our kids.

What does a first solution look like?

The good news is that mass-murder at schools is rare. That means that most schools will never face an attack. That is the good news.

Law enforcement officials put together a few simple facts, and some of those facts are very bad news. Murderers will kill dozens of victims before the police arrive at the scene. That means the solution has to be inside the school before the shooting starts. Defenders must be physically close to the victims and the attacker.

Law enforcement officers also noticed that about one-out-of-a-dozen adults are armed in public today. In most states, school boards can allow armed staff on campus. We conducted that experiment. We already have about 7 million days where a trained and qualified school staff member provided armed defense. So far, they never had to fire a shot at school.

Can we do better than that?

We’ve learned a lot about the people who attack our schools. These murderers enjoy planning their attacks. They spend years thinking about killing innocent people. I know that sounds sick, but it is extremely important. Mass murderers are not afraid to die, but they are deeply afraid of failing. They want to avoid a gun-fight where they might lose. These dedicated murderers deliberately look for gun-free zones so their victims will be unarmed. Unfortunately, we have been telling these murderers exactly where to go.

Politics are hard.

Many school districts put up signs that declared their schools to be “gun-free” zones. That made some administrators and politicians feel better. It certainly made mass murderers feel better. We advertised for mass-murderers and told them exactly where to find the victims they wanted. We should stop doing that now that we’ve studied the murderers.

Could a solution be that easy?

We have never seen a mass-murderer attack a school that had a public policy of allowing armed staff. The murderer chose to go someplace else or do something else. Life isn’t that easy. I’ve talked with school principals who have armed staff in their schools but who don’t have the political support to go public.

Let’s take what we can get.

We don’t have proof, but what we know makes sense. We know that mass murderers could kill several dozen victims before the police arrive. We think that trained and armed school staff will radically reduce the number of victims at school. That is what we learned from simulations and from force-on-force drills. That is what we learned from attempted mass murder outside of school. We think that taking down the “gun-free zone” sign will also make the attack less likely. So far, we think that putting up a different sign will prevent the attack in the first place.

So plastic signs make a difference?

The murderer gets a vote. He chooses where he will attack. We have thousands of schools that have never been attacked. Most of them did nothing at all. Some of them advertised that they were defended by armed staff. Some plastic signs seem to keep away the murderers. Armed school staff will at least reduce the number of victims if the murderer ignores the sign.

Conclusion

The answer you get depends on the question you ask.

Politicians tell us that gun-control stops murderers. The facts don’t bear that out. Murderers get to choose when, where, and how they attack.

• Armed defenders stop a mass-murder about once a month. They do that in public where ordinary citizens are allowed to go armed.
• A mass-murderer has never attacked a school with a public policy of armed staff. That could be luck, but it is probably a choice by the murderer.

It is hard to look at public violence and not be emotionally touched. Evil is real and can be devastating. We can choose an uplifting story for our students and for the rest of society. I admire dedicated defenders. They admit that evil exists and they love our children enough to defend them.

We tell the world what we think right there on the signpost.

Rob Morse writes about gun rights at his SlowFacts blog and hosts the Self Defense Gun Stories Podcast and co-hosts the Polite Society Podcast.

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