Would Armed Security Guards at Every School Solve the Problem? Part 8 in The Right Response?

Lawmakers in a number of states realize that disarming responsible citizens is an ineffective way of stopping shooting sprees by criminals and deranged individuals. They are now considering a far more intelligent response to massacres of the unarmed: How to terminate ineffective laws and regulations eliminating a teacher's right to protect his or her students.

Harrold School District
The prairie community of Harrold considered the threat of mass shootings at schools very carefully. In 2007 its school board voted unanimously to allow responsible employees to carry a concealed weapon. Each employee must obtain a state concealed-weapons permit, and then be approved by the board based on his/her personality and reaction to a crisis.

“We don’t have money for a security guard, but this is a better solution,” said Superintendent David Thweatt. “A shooter could take out a guard or officer with a visible, holstered weapon, but our teachers have master’s degrees, are older and have had extensive training. And their guns are hidden. We can protect our children.”

The Armed Sheriff's Deputy on Duty at Columbine
The 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado was not stopped by the armed sheriff's deputy on duty. He was unable to prevent two teenagers murdering twelve fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.

The so-called answer of having an armed security guard at each and every school therefore doesn't work very well. Yet it's not just ineffective, it's also very costly. The evidence from Columbine demonstrates this strategy as already tried and yet seriously lacking.

The Cops in Schools Program
Congress tried funding a Cops in Schools program, which was rapidly dropped by many schools after the federal funds for it ran out.

How can an armed deputy remain motivated year in and year out with nothing else to do but protect a school against the unlikely appearance of a deranged shooter? Those offering such a solution need to think things through. They need to explore the immediate as well as the hidden consequences of their actions.

Responsible lawmakers now recognize how to stop such shooting sprees. Effective solutions need both the widespread availability of responsible people on-site with a gun, yet also to realize the very slender chances that it would be needed.

Criminals fear Armed Resistance
The knowledge that their victims can be armed seriously deters both criminals and deranged individuals.

Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist, wrote in his 1991 book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, that only 13 percent of American burglaries occur when there's someone at home. But in Britain, where occupied-home burglaries account for about 45 percent of all break-ins, my late father was petrified of violent burglars. Gun-free Britain has three times more hot burglaries than the USA, a more violent country with many armed citizens.*

Kleck and others attribute America’s low rate of so-called hot burglaries to the fear among criminals that occupants might be armed. A survey of almost 2,000 convicted U.S. criminals, conducted in the late ’80s by criminologists Peter Rossi and James Wright, discovered that burglars are more afraid of homeowners with guns than of the police.

The Aurora Batman shooter Avoided Armed Citizens
Do criminals really avoid armed resistance?

Yes. Although at the time Colorado was a concealed-carry state, the Aurora movie theater was gun-free. The parent company, Cinemark Holdings, enforces a strict gun-free policy at all its locations, even for people with a concealed carry permit.**

The shooter went to the only cinema which did < i>not allow concealed gun carry, passing several others nearer. Why? Legal gun owners are turned away by Cinemark managers enforcing their "gun-free zone." Their fanatical stance ensured that the shooter in the Aurora massacre met no one able to defend themselves.

Yet frantic gun ban fanatics ignore all such grim evidence and panic about the mayhem resistance by an armed citizen might cause. They just pretend there was no mayhem in the far worse slaughters caused by mass shooters who met no one able to stop them with a bullet.

They refuse to contemplate why, when plane hijackings were the rage, Israel put security guards with firearms on their planes. Why ship hijackings have decreased now that ships carry armed guards...

The Inconvenient Truth
Gun control zealots ignore such inconvenient truths, and decline to ask themselves why. Such facts are also ignored by those in the media encouraging hysterical responses rather than meaningful discussion.

Yet there are those willing to consider the facts rationally. One parent whose child was killed in the Columbine shooting spree told Reuters that: "It certainly wouldn't hurt to have someone who is armed - even a teacher - who has the courage to protect the children at schools."

How many innocents must be slaughtered before the right to defend yourself, armed self-defense, becomes legal everywhere?

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!

Food for Thought
"Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent."

- Louis. D. Brandeis, 1856–1941, incorruptible Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. His opinions were, according to legal scholars, some of the greatest defenses of freedom ever written by a member of the Supreme Court.

* Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, by Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist, quoted in:
http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/an-honest-liberal-writes...

** The Right to Shoot Back: Another "Gun-Free-Zone" Fail. The Aurora Batman massacre was a gun-free zone:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/072312-619196-aurora-colorado-t...