The Failed Red State Solution to School Shootings: Armed Teachers and Campus Police

That old NRA mantra that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” just won’t die… even as increasing numbers of shooting victims do. That second NRA axiom “guns don’t kill, people kill” seems hypnotically etched in the minds of red state legislators and Second Amendment zealots. The corrected version should be “bad guys without guns, especially assault weapons, kill a whole lot fewer victims than those bad guys who do.”

The uniform red state response has been effectively to turn law enforcement over to a massive and largely unregulated cadre of civilian gun owners – released from all sorts of prior legal restraints and encouraged to have and use their weapons (e.g., “stand your ground” statutes) – to take down those bad guys. Those “civilians” are left with an individual choice of whom they consider to be a bad guy… and perhaps some of those good guys get angry enough or crazy enough to transition from good guy to a bad guy at a moment’s notice. It’s the Wild West with enhanced weapons. Chaos and an underlying NRA suggestion that having a ubiquitous spread of weapons – over 320 million guns, including about 30 million military grade semiautomatic assault rifles – is necessary for civilians to overthrow an unpopular government only make bad situation so much worse. Self-righteousness has replaced common sense.

Despite decades of Republican efforts to suppress the collection of statistics about civilian gun homicides (e.g., the 1996 Congressional Dickey Amendment), we now know that the leading cause of death among children 18 and younger is gunshot. Any cold, objective analysis of such numbers supports the unambiguous conclusion that our policies place gun ownership above any notion of protecting our children from harm. Red state “right to life” arguments seem to crash and burn under this most basic analysis.

The cry of “arm our teachers” was the immediate response to so many shootings in public schools. No one asked the teachers if they wanted to carry guns, knew how to use guns and whether all those teachers were sufficiently mentally stable, not prone to strong reactive anger, to be trusted to make the right decisions. Leave it to Texas – the “we’re taking over the Rio Grande,” an international waterway, with barbed wire floatation barriers against the exclusive federal government control of our borders – to come up a BIG OLD TEXAS STYLE solution to school shooting. Put an armed and trained police officer in every Texas public school. Does that including giving them AR-15s too?

The September 3rd Associated Press looked at the Texas “eyes were so much bigger than their stomach” solution, a post-Uvalde shooting piece of Governor Gregg Abbott’s rightwing legislative agenda: put a cop in every school: “A vision of armed officers at every school in Texas is crashing into the reality of not enough money or police as a new mandate took effect Friday [9/1], showing how a goal more states are embracing in response to America’s cycle of mass killings is proving unworkable in many communities.

“Dozens of Texas’ largest school districts, which educate many of the state’s 5 million students, are reopening classrooms without meeting the state’s new requirements of armed officers on every campus. The mandate is a pillar of a safety bill signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who rejected calls this year for gun control despite angry pleas from parents of children killed in the Uvalde school massacre.

“Texas has nearly 9,000 public school campuses, second only to California, making the requirement the largest of its kind in the U.S…. ‘We all support the idea,’ said Stephanie Elizalde, superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, which has more than 140,000 students. ‘The biggest challenge for all superintendents is that this is yet again an unfunded mandate.’

“The difficulties lay bare limits of calls to put armed guards at every school, more than a decade after the National Rifle Assn. championed the idea in the face of an intense push for stronger gun laws following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012… The new Texas law allows exceptions and does not require districts to report compliance, making it unclear how many schools are meeting the standard… But by all accounts, many are not.

“The Associated Press contacted 60 of Texas’ largest school districts about whether they were able to start the school year in compliance. The districts, which cut across a wide swath of Texas, from rapidly growing suburbs to the U.S.-Mexico border, enroll more than 2.7 million students combined… Not all districts responded and some declined to discuss staffing levels, citing security concerns. But statements to the AP, along with a review of school board meeting actions and statements made to local media, show at least half have been unable to comply with the law’s highest standard…

“Local school officials say the additional funding Texas gave districts under the new law, about $15,000 per campus, is hardly sufficient. In Dallas, Elizalde said an extra $75,000 is needed for each additional officer in Texas’ second-largest district… In the scramble to comply with Texas’ new standards, options some districts previously never considered are now on the table: Some are turning to private security firms or arming more teachers and other staffers.”

Indeed, guns have become so easy to obtain in red states, particularly Texas, that the flood of “anyone who wants a gun can get one” reality has seeped into the massive cross-border smuggling of American-made guns south into Latin America to make regional drug cartels rich, powerful, with politicians south of the border bought and paid for… to fuel that massive drug trade that has so infected our nation. 90%+ of cartel weapons seized south of our border came from the United States.

Tourists are beginning to avoid our country under official warnings from their governments that the US represents a very dangerous country by reason of out-of-control civilian gun ownership. If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it sure as hell can reverse the first case in over two centuries to sanction ubiquitous gun ownership – Heller vs DC (2008) – and bring this nation back from the bring of gun violence hell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the only clear and obvious solution to escalating gun US gun violence is increased regulation of gun ownership and the complete removal of assault weapons from civilian ownership (as was our law from 1994 through 2004).