Each time a school shooting occurs, people get terribly emotional and lose their common sense. They start demanding all sorts of new gun laws, thinking that will fix the problem. Ironically, none of the laws they demand would have prevented the past tragedies and have no substantial chance of preventing any future tragedies.
Here is a fact of life. Some people are killers. They like to kill people. They may be angry. They may be disturbed. They may be insane, but they like to kill, and they will kill. People have been killing other people since the beginning of time. Long before we had guns, people found ways to kill each other. Even if you take away the guns now, people will still find ways to kill each other.
Since some people are so passionate about killing, we have numerous strict laws against it, but killers disobey those laws. If a person is not going to obey laws against murder, why would that same person obey laws regarding to guns? Since killers do not obey laws, the answer is not more laws. The answer is defense.
The most effective way to prevent the vast majority of school shootings is to allow teachers with proper firearm training to carry secured (locked) weapons in the school. That way, when a shooter penetrates the school's defenses, the teachers will be armed and able to engage the shooter in a fair fight.
People will argue that a teacher might snap during class and shoot a child, but that is a flawed argument. If a teacher is angry enough to shoot a child, the teacher is certainly angry enough to beat a child to death. If a teacher is prone to violence, the teacher is dangerous to the children armed or not. If you cannot trust a teacher to be armed around the children, then you should not trust that same teacher to be unarmed around the children. By the way, just because administrators tell a teacher he/she cannot bring a weapon into the school, that does not mean the teacher will obey. Remember, only the law-abiding care about the rules.
For those who cannot get past the idea of armed teachers, a more politically correct solution is to station a police officer in every school whenever students are present. Since this would require an officer to be present around seven hours each day for around one hundred and eighty days each year at each school, the costs would be significant, possibly up to $100,000 per year.
All of this money does not have to be wasted, however. The officer does not need to just sit in an office or the parking lot. The officer can be around the school teaching the students during the regular school day. The officer can give lessons in traffic safety, gun safety, drug education, anti-bullying, abduction prevention, self-defense, conflict resolution, emergency preparedness, Internet safety, etc. Cops have a lot of training, and a lot of that training could translate to helpful lessons for small children. We live in a dangerous world. Why not prepare our children to survive it?
Yes, it would be expensive to station an officer in every school, but when you think about the safety of the children, would the costs be that severe? Let's say you can protect five hundred little kids for $100,000 or less each year. That works out to only $200 per year per student. In larger schools, the costs would be even less per child. When you factor in that each officer could actually be serving a legitimate educational role, the costs are really not that steep.
We do not even need to hire new officers to do the job. Just pull them from less important duties like busting massage parlors, pulling over people with expired tags or no seatbelts, and catching soccer moms in speedtraps on the way to the grocery store during the day. Which is more important: keeping the minivans from going five miles over the speed limit or protecting a campus full of little kids from a psychopath?
Well, even if people are not willing to pull cops off of non-essential duties or spring for the extra money to hire more officers, we still have the option of allowing teachers to carry weapons responsibly. The bottom line is we do not need fewer guns in school, we need more guns in the right hands in school. Think back to any school shooting that comes to your mind and ask yourself how things might have been different if some responsible adults in the school had been armed and able to properly protect the kids.
Don't ever forget, schools are one of the few places that have a full ban on guns. In theory, schools should be absolutely free of gun violence, but, in reality, how is the whole gun-free zone concept working? It seems to work perfectly for the shooter, because when he comes, he is the only one armed, and he knows it. Imagine how quickly the balance of power would shift if the shooter knows that when he starts shooting, someone is bound to start shooting back.
