Since the Columbine murders in 1999, several
important steps have been taken to prevent or thwart school shootings.
Much more still needs to be done.
The good news is that, since Columbine, police tactics in school attacks
have dramatically changed. At Columbine, the armed “school resource
officer”
refused to pursue the killers into the building, and kept himself
safe outside while the murders were going on inside. Even after SWAT
teams arrived, and while, via an open 911 line, the authorities knew
that students were being methodically executed in the library, the
police stood idle just a few yards outside the library.
To this day, the authorities in Jefferson County, Colorado, have
successfully covered up who made the decision that the police would
stand idle.
Fortunately, police tactics have changed dramatically since that
disgraceful day. Now, the standard police response to an “active
shooter” is immediate counter-action. For example, at a March 2001
attack on Santana High School in Santee,
California, the police response was immediate, and saved lives. It was
the first time ever that a school shooting had been met with prompt
police counter-action.
Discouraging Media Encouragement
A second form of progress post-Columbine has been in greater news media
responsibility. Time and Newsweek put the Columbine
killers on the front cover — giving them precisely the sort of
posthumous infamy which motivates many mass murderers. As Clayton Cramer
has documented, massive
publicity given to mass murderers plays a significant role in
encouraging more mass murders.
In the 21st century, the mainstream media have been somewhat
more responsible about focusing coverage on the victims, rather than the
perpetrator. While stories are still written about perpetrators,
they are less likely to be rewarded (in effect) with a big picture on
the front of a magazine or newspaper.
Although
the copycat effect may have been mitigated by giving perpetrators a
little less publicity, it continues. Thus, schools and law enforcement
should be especially vigilant right now, and on future anniversaries of
school shootings.
Self-Defeating Self-Esteem
After Columbine, there was a great push for anti-bullying programs and
the like. Whether bullying was or is a major cause of shootings is
debatable. Columbine killer Eric Harris likely suffered from a
superiority complex; his
problem was excessive self-esteem. Indeed, many criminals have
excessively high self-esteem, and one cause of their criminality is the
large gap between how most people see them (accurately, as mediocre
losers) and their own self-image. Self-esteem programming in the
schools, whatever its merits, might even be counterproductive to school
safety.
One important value of anti-bullying programs, however, is that most of
them strongly encourage students to come forward and report a problem.
Much more so than in the pre-Columbine period, students and other
community members who hear rumors or threats of a school attack have
been willing to warn the authorities. There have been many attacks which
have been prevented only because someone did so. The willingness of
people to speak up has been the most significant post-Columbine step
forward in safety, and has likely saved many dozens of lives.
Compared to the Columbine aftermath, there is much less inclination
among the political classes, and, even much of the media, to use school
murders as a pretext for irrelevant anti-gun laws. If it were actually
possible to ban all guns, and confiscate all of the more than 200
million firearms in America, school killers would be deprived of their
most effective weapon — since most killers don’t have the skills to
build bombs, and a criminal can’t use a knife or sword to control two
dozen people at a distance.
But it is pretty clear that the kinds of laws which were pushed after
Columbine (one-gun-a-month in California,
special restrictions on gun shows in Colorado and Oregon) are of
little value in keeping guns away from people who plan their attacks a
long period of time in advance.
Notably, Canada has adopted almost everything (and more) which American
anti-gun lobbies have pushed in the United States. Yet this fall’s spate
of copycat school shootings began on September 13 in Canada, when Dawson
College, in Montreal, was attacked by a 25-year-old man who killed one
victim and wounded 19 more, putting two of them into a coma.
(Fortunately, two policemen happened to be on campus, and they took
immediate action, rather than waiting for a SWAT team to arrive. Their
prompt and heroic boldness likely saved many lives.)
The Kids Aren’t Always the Killers
The attacks this fall highlight a problem that was forgotten in
the post-Columbine frenzy. There are lots of attacks which are not
perpetrated by disaffected students. We knew this in 1988, when
30-year-old Laurie Dann attacked a second-grade classroom in Winnetka,
Illinois, and in January 1989, when an adult criminal named Patrick
Purdy attacked a school playground in Stockton, California. Or when
British pederast Thomas Hamilton killed 16 kindergarteners and a teacher
in Dunblane, Scotland.
One reason why adult sociopaths so
often choose to attack schools — schools to which they have no
particular connection — is that schools are easy targets. It is not
surprising that police stations, hunting-club meetings, stateside army
bases, NRA offices, and similar locations known to contain armed adults
are rarely attacked.
Because of the spread of concealed-handgun licensing laws, now in
40 out of 50 states, whenever you walk into a place with a large
crowd of people — a restaurant, a theater, a shopping mall — you can
safely assume that several people in the crowd will have a license to
carry a concealed handgun, and some of them are currently carrying.
Schools are one of the few places in the United States where the
government has guaranteed that there will be no licensed, trained adults
with a concealed firearm that could be used to resist a would-be mass
murderer.
Since this fact is apparently obvious to random psychopaths, it would be
very dangerous to assume that the fact is not obvious to terrorists
also. Beslan, Russia, shows that terrorists with al Qaeda connections
consider schools to be good targets. There is also the danger of
self-starting jihadis, such as the man who attacked the Jewish community
center in Seattle. Every Jewish school and community center should very
seriously consider having at least one full-time security guard.
Israel
has successfully used a combination of security guards, armed teachers,
and armed escorts on field trips to protect schools from terrorist
attack. Thailand is likewise allowing teachers to obtain handgun-carry
licenses in southern regions where schools have been targeted by Islamic
terrorists.
One confirmation of the strength of the case for allowing teachers the
choice to be armed is the weakness of the arguments against it.
Significantly, we have real-world tests of the policy — not only in
Israel and Thailand, but also in the United States.
The State Solution
Like many states, Utah enacted a concealed-handgun licensing law in
1995. Unlike most states,
Utah did not
make schools an exclusion zone for lawful carrying. Not only a
teacher on duty, but also a parent coming to pick up a child from
school, can lawfully carry a concealed handgun in a Utah school building
— after, of course, passing a background check and safety training. (See
Utah Code sect. 76-10-505.5. In 2003, the legislature expanded the law,
by allowing principals to authorize firearms possession by individuals
who did not have a concealed-handgun carry permit.)
After eleven years of experience in Utah, we now have exactly
zero reported
problems of concealed handgun licensees misusing guns at school, or
students stealing guns from teachers, or teachers using their licensed
firearms to shoot or threaten students. During this same period, we also
have had exactly zero mass murders in Utah schools.
My proposal, however, is not that other states go as far as Utah.
Rather, I simply suggest that teachers and other school employees be
allowed to carry if they obtain a handgun carry permit. If a school
wants to require special additional training for school carry, that’s
fine.
Some people who do not like the idea of teachers being armed to protect
students simply get indignant, or declare that armed teachers are
inconsistent with a learning environment. I suggest that dead students —
and the traumatic aftermath of a school attack — are far more
inconsistent with a learning environment than is a math teacher having a
concealed handgun.
“Teachers don’t want to carry guns!” some people exclaim. True enough,
for most teachers. But there are
about six million teachers in the United States, and it would be
foolish to make claims about what every teacher thinks. The one thing
that almost all teachers have in common is that they have passed a
fingerprint-based background check, meaning that they are significantly
less likely than the general population to have a criminal history.
There are plenty of teachers who have served in the military, or the
police, or who have otherwise acquired familiarity with firearms. And
there will be other teachers who would willingly undergo the training
necessary to learn how to use a firearm to protect themselves and their
students. After all, almost all the teachers in southern Thailand are
Buddhists, and if some Buddhist teachers will choose to carry handguns,
it would be ridiculous to claim that American teachers, as a universal
category, would never exercise the choice to carry.
We know that school shootings have been stopped by armed citizens with
guns. In 1997, a Mississippi attack was thwarted after vice principal
Joel Myrick retrieved a
handgun from his trunk. The killer had already shot several people at
Pearl High School, and was leaving that school to attack Pearl Junior
High, when Myrick pointed his .45 pistol at the killer’s head and
apprehended him. A few days later, an armed adult
stopped a school rampage in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.
It is commonly, but incorrectly, believed that the federal Gun-Free
School Zones Act creates an insurmountable barrier to arming teachers.
Not so. The GFSZA has a
specific exemption for persons who have a concealed handgun carry
permit from the state where the school is located, if the state requires
a background check before issuance of a permit.
It is state laws, not the federal GFSZ Act, which are in need of reform
to allow schools to be protected.
Your School, Right Now
Pending legal reform, there are several steps that school districts can
take to improve school safety. Almost all teachers spend several days a
year in continuing professional education programs. Every school
district should begin, at least, offering self-defense training as an
option to teachers on “in-service” days.
These programs should explain the critical importance of decisive action
by teachers in the very first moments when an armed intruder has entered
a room. The faster that students get out, the more lives that can be
saved. Allowing an intruder to take control of the room, and line
students up, or tie them up, is extremely dangerous. If students flee
immediately (especially if the room has at least two exits), the
criminal will have a much harder time obtaining control and taking
hostages.
Undoubtedly, the criminal might begin shooting immediately. But if the
victim is moving and is constantly getting further from the shooter, it
is much harder for the shooter to deliver a critical hit. In contrast,
when the victims are stationary and under the shooter’s control, the
killer has an easy time delivering a fatal head shot from a foot away.
At Columbine, some fleeing students were wounded, some of them very
seriously. But almost all the fatalities were the result of up-close
executions of stationary victims.
Defensive training for teachers can also include how quickly to disarm a
person with a gun, especially when his attention is distracted. This can
be a dangerous move, to be sure, and it does not always work. If it
does, perhaps everyone’s lives can saved. If it does not, the killer has
no greater power than if the move were never attempted.
At a more advanced level, there are programs such as
Krav Maga (“contact
combat”) — a technique of unarmed self-defense currently used by some
U.S. police departments, and the Israeli Defense Forces. It was
originally created
by Jews in Bratislava, during the 1930s, for self-defense against anti-semitic
thugs who might have weapons. Every school district should offer to pay
half the tuition for a teacher who takes classes in Krav Maga or similar
programs. Introductory versions of these programs could also be offered
for free on in-service days.
Of the teachers who would never choose to carry a firearm, some would
choose to carry non-lethal defensive sprays. Basic training in defensive
spray-use takes an afternoon. Schools could offer more sophisticated
training as well, focused on the situations most likely be encountered
in a school.
Pepper sprays are not always a panacea (they don’t work on some
criminals, especially ones who eat a lot of spicy foods), but they can
save lives. While a predator is writhing in excruciating pain, he will
lose control of the situation, allowing students to flee, and giving the
teacher a good chance of taking the gun.
And what about self-defense for students? Incorporating several days of
self-defense into the annual physical education curriculum would be
sensible anyway, even if there were no problems with school shootings.
Self-defense training will make students less vulnerable at isolated bus
stops, and everywhere else. The core of all self-defense training is
greater awareness of one’s environment, so that a person can get away
from potential trouble before it becomes actual trouble.
Self-defense training also teaches that it is dangerous to let a
criminal take control of your surroundings; even if a criminal is
pointing a gun at you, you are probably better off to try running away,
than to let him put you in a car where he can transport you to an
isolated location.
Teachers and students would also learn that it is sometimes better to
submit; if you can surrender you purse to a mugger, and protect yourself
from injury, that it often the safe choice. We know, however, than when
an armed criminal attempts to take over a school, there is no realistic
hope that the criminal will be satisfied with stealing some money.
Consider a 12th-grade classroom containing 15 healthy males,
several of whom are athletes. If the males rush the perpetrator en
masse, some of them would might be shot, but it also likely that the
perpetrator would be quickly subdued, all the more so since most school
shooters are not physically powerful. The school shooting in
Springfield, Oregon,
ended when several brave students, including wrestler Jake Ryker,
rushed the shooter; Ryker was shot, but recovered.
To some people, the notion that teachers like Joel Myrick or students
like Jake Ryker should engage in active resistance is highly offensive,
and the idea that teachers and students should be encouraged to learn
active resistance is outrageous.
Our nation has too many people who are not only unwilling to learn how
to protect themselves, but who are also determined to prevent innocent
third persons from practicing active defense. A person has the right to
choose to be a pacifist, but it is wrong to force everyone else to act
like a pacifist. It is the policies of the pacifist-aggressives which
have turned American schools into safe zones for mass murderers.
School shootings are the ultimate form of bullying, and long experience
shows that the more likely and more effective the resistance, the less
the bullying.
If a trained teacher carries a concealed defensive tool, such as pepper
spray, there is no downside except an offense against the self-righteous
sensibilities of pacifist-aggressives. Except for criminals, everyone
would be a lot safer — and not just at school — if teachers and students
were encouraged to learn at least basic unarmed self-defense.
— Dave Kopel is research
director at the Independence Institute.
