Dakota Beacon

One of the problems with writing opinion pieces these days is that everything seems so terribly obvious.  Take the tragic shooting that occurred this week in Nashville.  Everyone by now knows what went on there but for purposes of making my point I will summarize.

A 28-year-old woman with serious mental problems, including her insistence that she was a man, wrote a manifesto (to date not released by police) as an explanation and then went to a Christian school she had once attended and managed to terrorize the entire school and shoot 

and kill six innocent people, three of them children, at the school.  Fortunately for the rest, the police acted appropriately and went into the school and took down the shooter, thus saving other lives.  Accounts also tell us that the school personnel acted courageously and some died protecting the children.  The shooter, being dead now, can only speak through past actions and words - including the thus-far unreleased manifesto.  

She is said to have surveyed another site for her wanton attack but was deterred by the knowledge that it was protected by armed personnel, perhaps guards, and that the Covenant School was known to be a gun-free zone.  There she would have no meaningful resistance - at least not until she had accomplished her mission of mass murder to a satisfactory degree.  It would have been useless, in her view, then, to have expended her attempt at notoriety by being felled after the first shot.

This leads to the inevitable common sense resolution that there need to be armed personnel in schools to deter or at worst case, limit, the harm such a shooter might inflict on innocent schoolchildren, teachers and staff.  If we are to have schools, where young children or even teens or young adults are in classes, it behooves such schools to take all reasonable measures to protect them from danger, whether that be fire hazards, structural issues or criminals.  

The simple-minded, “liberal”, knee-jerk reaction is predictable - ban guns.  Easy.  No guns, no gun-related crime.  Except that crime has also been banned and - surprise, surprise - that hasn’t stopped crime.  Mass murder, we must remind these people, is a crime. It has been banned, and not just yesterday, but thousands of years ago.  It has always been a crime.  That means that someone is breaking the law to do this.  Following the basic logic of Dick and Jane, if someone is willing to break the law to commit murder, breaking another law to obtain a gun is a given.  So banning guns, although it would severely restrict an innocent, law-abiding person’s ability to protect himself, his family or his neighbors, would do absolutely nothing to deter a criminal intent upon murder.  

Matt Walsh and others before have advocated using armed guards in our schools.  While this would seem an improvement over nothing there are two down-sides to this solution.  First, is that our schools are already prison-like enough as it is, with the institutional feeding troughs and the regimentation and the locker snooping and  \usual bullying that goes on there full-time.  Adding armed guards would make it even more profoundly depressing an experience for a sentient human being.  But how effective would they be?  An armed guard would stand out like a sore thumb.  Everyone would know who he is.  The armed guard can be only in one place at a time, just like the rest of us, and that would probably mean at the door.  So to get around this obstacle there might be two ways:  1.  Get to know the guard and have a believable pretext on which to get past him and down the hall to the classrooms or 2. Shoot him on sight and get it over with and then go down the hall looking for your prey.  Either way the chances are fairly good that this would be a high-hazard occupation and not very effective if the perpetrator did some advance planning.  There is one more thing to consider:  do we really want to out-source this service?  

Years ago I remember a horrible incident in a Travelodge in Memphis.  A couple of women on leave from the military, and their kids, a young girl and an infant, were traveling through Memphis on their way home.  They left the girl in the room with the baby while they went to do their laundry, believing the children would be safe as there was an armed guard on duty.  When they were gone the guard broke into the room and tried to assault the girl.  She jumped out of a window to her death.  In the various follow-up stories in the wake of this terrible incident, we learned that security guards are often (not always, of course) rather sketchy individuals and that many states do not have regulations which screen some pretty undesirable people out of the business.  Sometimes even people who, as private citizens, were not allowed to own firearms, were permitted to carry as employees of a security company.  Hopefully at least this is no longer the case.  So armed guards are not necessarily the solution.  And weren’t there armed guards at the school in Parkland, Florida, who never even went inside the school once the shooting started?  (That was a rhetorical question.  The answer is yes.)

Far more useful and a much greater deterrent would be to arm classroom teachers, office and building staff and administrators.  Imagine how difficult it would be to get away with commission of such a mass murder if just about any adult in the building could drop you like a bag of wet cement.  Not only no fame, no headlines, no sympathy from wrong-headed analysts, but very likely no victims either.  You might as well just run into traffic on the interstate highway or throw yourself in front of a train.  If I were in charge, I would offer a substantial stipend to all teachers and staff who agreed to carry a gun and take regular training and practice in its use and pass gun safety exams annually.  Anyone who did not want to do so would get the regular pay without the extra stipend and have no complaint.  No one would be forced to carry a gun.

If we are screening school employees - staff and faculty - as we should be anyway, this would seem to provide better odds at least.  And the uncertainty of whether a given teacher was armed or not would be a huge deterrent for anyone wanting to make headlines by mass murder.  One might argue that some miscreants might become teachers but then, the more people who are armed, the less likely that such a person would be able to act out.  The greater the number and diversity of people who are armed, the less the likelihood of any one of them behaving irresponsibly or criminally.  It is true of schools and true of all other places of human interaction.

Overall, the people at Covenant School at least did some things better than others before them have done - they did not herd everyone into some closet where they could be shot all at once.  Personally, if I were in this situation I would get the kids out even if through windows, and tell them to run in different directions and head home, to make it difficult for a shooter.  This has its perils, but none so great as getting shot in the hall or broom closet.  There is no such thing as a “safe room” in such a situation.  From reports we have heard these teachers acted valiantly to protect as many kids as they could and probably saved many young lives at the expense of their own.  At least one of the children attempted to set off an alarm, which got her shot and killed.  She perhaps saved others.  A remarkable child.

When we have an incident like this there is little to be said beyond the heartbreaking tragedy.  But we owe it to the next classroom and the next teacher to learn from these episodes.  What can we learn from this one?  What stands out?  What was typical, on the other hand?  What stands out is that the police acted appropriately and limited the harm to the students and the teachers likewise acted properly to protect as many kids as they could.  What is typical, and therefore very dangerous, is that this was known to the shooter to be a “gun-free zone”.  She would have likely known this school very well, inasmuch as she attended there at one time.  She would have known this was not protected or she would have picked a different target.  In fact, she did.  She chose this because she knew no one could stop her.  What we should ban is “gun-free zones”, not guns.  It was the absence of a gun-free zone which protected one venue and the fact of such a designation which doomed the other.  

This is what I meant by playing Captain Obvious.  It seems that we should no more have to debate this than we need to question whether gravity keeps us from floating away.  It is painfully obvious what we are doing wrong that is enabling such events to take place.  This should also be extended to outlaw “gun-free zones” in general, in places which serve the public.  We have other laws and regulations intended for public safety in such places.  We don’t allow a restaurant to have a roof caving in from snow, we insist on fire safety and food safety in public places.  We should make it necessary to allow patrons to carry guns in public areas like a Starbucks or a mall or any other place, even churches or synagogues.  Imagine how many people who long to make the news and be talked about by Tucker Carlson or the View girls who would know that doing so by trying to have a mass shooting would be futile.  Again and again we hear about someone with a gun, perhaps a cop but perhaps just a citizen, stopping what might have been a major news story involving mass killing.  Usually these stories are before us only briefly because nothing happened.  We only hear about the ones where people die.  Recently I watched a woman testifying about her experience where she and her parents were in a restaurant when a shooter came in and began killing people.  Her parents both died in the event.  She lamented that she had left her gun in her car rather than carrying it with her.  She could have stopped the killing - not only of her own beloved parents, but of other innocent victims.  She’s haunted by this.  

Instead of acting stupidly, as Biden and most elected Democrats would have us do (and even some misguided, idiotic Republicans) we should use common sense and simple logic.  It is amazing what these techniques can do and how far they can help us avoid these tragedies.  It is always better to rely on our common sense, follow the guidelines of Occam’s Razor.  If a shooter wants to kill a lot of people, he will avoid trying to do this where there is no telling how many people will be armed and likely to shoot him first.  Simple.