Posted on 03/31/2023 10:06:41 AM PDT by george76
There are many fierce, hungry tigers living near your home and they are stalking your children. How best to protect your young ones: declaw the tigers, or equip your home with strong defenses so they cannot enter, and if they do they will be stopped dead?
This is the essential question tragically raised once again in the bloody wake of the Tennessee Christian elementary school massacre. Anti-gun media talking heads, Democrat legislators, government officials, teachers’ Union chieftain Randi Weingarten, and Democrat gun-haters in general as usual are claiming the only way to stop these horrific attacks is declaw the tigers – that is, pass more laws to restrict gun ownership. They steadfastly refuse to face the reality that a crazed shooter will always find a way to obtain a gun – in the Nashville killer’s case seven of them. When the tiger comes to the door, the only defense is making sure the animal doesn’t get inside to murder innocents.
We know how to do that; the killers have shown us. Mass murderers may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. Just like the Nashville shooter decided not to hit a school because it had “too much security” most killers will very deliberately avoid a target where they could be killed by an armed defender before they can achieve the carnage they intend.
Similarly, the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter who killed 12 and injured 70 in 2012 specifically said he looked for a theater with a “Gun Free Zone” sign, bypassing other movie houses closer to where he lived that lacked that sign. Nearly all massacres – whether in schools, churches, or shopping malls – have that fatal sign in common.
It’s not clear if the Covenant School had such a sign. But we do know that a shooter will likely avoid a target with security such as an armed guard, say a volunteer retired veteran, or a school resource officer working for the local police force. Or a school with armed staff who can mount immediate resistance.
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The Nashville police have been praised because it took them only 14 minutes to respond, yet even that quick action cost six lives. During the 2018 massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the killer took less than 7 minutes to murder 14 students (9 of them aged 15 and under) and three staff - seventeen souls gone altogether in mere moments.
The key to fewer dead children is faster response time by armed staff who are actually at the ready inside the school at all times.
To the horror of the gun-phobic and the gun-grabbers, that means well-trained school staff – teachers, janitors, administrators – who are carrying concealed weapons. But won’t kids wrest the guns from them and spray the classroom with hot lead? Or an annoyed teacher takes out an annoying student for cracking gum?
Well, no. Colorado is one of 32 states allowing teachers and staff to protect children with a concealed carry firearm. Laura Carno is Executive Director of FASTER Colorado, the nonprofit that trains school personnel to defend their schools. FASTER is an acronym for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response, originally begun in Ohio after the 2012 Sandy Hook, Conn., shooter murdered 20 children and six teachers. Carno brought the training to Colorado about seven years ago and the number of trained school staff has now risen to 300 people in 41 of the state’s 178 school districts.
In those seven years, there has never been an incident of accidental fire, or an intruder bent on murder entering a school with a firearm. Since about 10% of Colorado’s population are longtime concealed carry permit holders, school-based volunteers for the FASTER program which uses active-duty law enforcement trainers with SWAT experience, are plentiful. About 40% of the FASTER participants are classroom teachers, while 60% are principals, superintendents, lunch ladies, school nurses, or janitors.
In the few days since the Covenant School tragedy, Carno has heard from about 10 new Colorado school districts interested in her program. People seem to be looking beyond more gun control laws to common sense ideas that can keep children safe. “The closer an armed staffer is to the beginning of a violent event, the sooner it is stopped, and the fewer people die. Since killers don't know which staff members are armed, that itself is a huge deterrent,” Carno says. “Every time there’s one of these horrible shootings, more school board members and superintendents move to the decision that they have to do something to protect the children.” Carno approves of the School Resource Officer (SRO) concept but points out, “Armed staff is a free or low-cost addition to SRO’s because one or two SRO’s can't cover the entire school.” The FASTER program offers financial assistance.
The idea of well-trained and armed volunteer school staff is gaining traction, according to reports. After Parkland, a special Commission analyzing the slaughter recommended that every middle school and high school in Florida have an armed school resource officer and that a program allowing for trained teachers to carry concealed weapons should be greatly expanded. A similar recommendation was made in a Federal Commission on School Safety (2018) report.
In predictable contrast, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and gun-control outfits (e.g., Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund) strongly oppose arming teachers.
These organizations are not fans of the Second Amendment. Political ideology often determines trust or distrust in firearms for school security. A Pew Research survey in 2021 found that 66% of Republicans support allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in K-12 schools, while only 24% of Democrats approve. What a shock.
Yet a Rasmussen survey in 2022 found that by a 49% to 37% margin, Americans support armed teachers to stop school shootings; a significant jump up from their 2018 survey when Americans opposed it by 43% for to 48% against. Significantly, adults with children at home supported armed school staff by 57%.
Still, anti-gun derangement syndrome has taken firm hold of radical union boss Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She insists her union members don’t even want the right to defend themselves, even though brave educators from Columbine to the Parkland massacre and now at Covenant have died trying to protect their kids. “Teachers don’t want to be armed; we want to teach,” she railed. “We would never have the expertise needed to be sharpshooters…” The dead, like the Head of School at Covenant, may disagree.
Never has there been a more sickening display of a union putting crass political alliances before human lives, and children's lives at that. Next election, parents must remember that the teachers’ unions are the most prolific contributors to leftist causes and Democrat candidates. Make sure you know where your school board candidates stand on protecting your kids from the ravening tigers.
All of them dont have to be armed, they just need to have the choice. None of them have to actually be armed. If the public knows teachers can be armed, the shooters wont show up.
Well, it would be interesting to test your theory, if some state would go for it and arm teachers. My guess is school districts are afraid of the liability, in case some kid steals a teacher’s gun and shoots someone, or a teacher shoots a kid messing with a toy gun thinking it’s real, or whatever such scenarios the school district bureaucrats can dream up.
Most of these school shooters expect to be killed — it’s a sort of Samsonic suicide thing with them. It might not keep them from showing up. Again, it would be interesting to test it out and see what happens.
I grew up in a household of teachers. And all my best friends parents were teachers. Not a one of them would have been "horrified" to protect the children under their care.
"But that does not mean the teachers would not have to. And most teachers, especially those who teach early grades, are simply not cut out to be Annie Oakley.
Again, you miss the point. You are giving those school staff members the possibility of defending themselves if necessary. The alternative is that they die. Oh, and my teacher mom could shoot better than the males in the family, handgun or rifle.
Perhaps they would not be horrified to protect children under their care, but the ones I know really were horrified at the thought of being expected to double as armed security guards. They are fine with having professional armed guards on campus.
If teachers want to carry to protect themselves and their kids, that’s fine by me. Again, I suspect the problem is school district officials are afraid of liability in case something goes wrong.
My late mother was a sharp shooting champion in our state back when she was on her high school’s girls’ rifle team. Most teachers now teaching have probably never even fired a gun.
Yer a bit behind the times....32 states have school districts with that policy. John Lott has surveyed the data. NOT ONE OF THOSE DISTRICTS has suffered an "active shooter" situation since putting the policy into effect.
Corporate legal departments have decided the financial risk to the company from an accidental shooting, is less than the cost of replacing killed employees.
People, never forget that corporate management cares far more about their bonuses and stock options than they care about you.
Typo:...is more..
The main goal of many schools at all levels of education seems to be to protect jobs and the school's reputation.
One 911 caller said the school has one or two staff members who carry:
In the town where I raised a family, I did not send my kids to the public schools, but I did make some observations: There was never a school shooting there, but the school’s had a heavy police presence at the opening and closing of every school day, as the kids walked in and walked out. The rest of the day, the doors to the elementary school were locked (I don’t know about the other schools). You could not enter without buzzing and talking to someone at the front office. And the doors were not glass doors.
Those security measures do not guarantee the safety of every child from predators working in the schools, for example, but a heavy police presence may be a deterrent to predators (or would-be school shooters) outside the schools.
Oops.
* the schools had
That’s interesting. I had not read about Covenant staff being armed before. If true, I guess it did not make any difference in the outcome?
I wondered whether Katherine Koonce might have been carrying, as I read earlier that she ran to confront the mass murderer. But from this article it appears that she probably was unarmed when she confronted her:
It will be interesting to learn who at the school was armed and whether any of them were there that day, and if so, what they did.
I can see where the police presence at opening and closing time would be deterrent. When I looked at list of school shootings, a number of them were gang type shootings outside the school at closing time or at school sporting events, etc.
The locked doors with no glass seem to be effective if they stay locked (Uvalde door left unlocked). Of course if a kid sneaks a gun in (Ethan Crumbley, Oxford High), locked doors are no use.
The teacher would not be expected to hunt down and neutralize the threat, only to either return fire or slow the attacker.
Which shows exactly how strongly MOST teachers feel about protecting their charges. I am sure as she was confronting the shooter she was thinking "I wish I had a gun".
Armed staff's position in the "threat pyramid" is 1) ultimate final line of defense if a classroom is breached, and 2) an opportunistic encounter with the shooter outside of classrooms.
Meaning that if the teacher has a loaded gun already in hand when a shooter entered her classroom, she might stand a chance of shooting him first. The first thing the teacher is supposed to do is lock the classroom door. If the shooter enters before she is notified to lock the door — surprise! — would she be able to shoot him first? Seems doubtful. So that leaves the teacher confronting the shooter when she happens to be elsewhere in the school. Do these teachers carry a loaded gun on their persons everywhere? Maybe they do. I honestly don’t know.
Again, I am all for teachers being able to protect themselves and their kids. I am skeptical whether this would prevent all deaths caused by school shooters. It might deter some shooters and save some lives.
You would still need police to hunt down and neutralize the shooter.
I never doubted that teachers want to protect their students. Katherine Koonce was head of the school. It sure would have been great if she had had a gun and able to shoot the murderer before she shot her. See also my #55 on this thread.
prevent all deaths.
No guarantee but not having a gun doesn’t stop any.
It’s just like a home invasion. The father may very well die in a shoot out but he may have saved his wife and kids.
Just seeing that the teacher is armed could cause the criminal to hesitate or throw off his(her-its) aim. In any case the teacher is no worse off than being unarmed.
On the other hand, one of the teachers was found to be abusing students, so...
No security measure will ever be 100% effective.
Columbine had an armed guard, and he and another officer exchanged gunfire with the killers, who still managed to massacre people.
Sandy Hook had glass doors the killer shot through. So, locked metal doors might be a deterrent, but even metal doors need to open as people go in and out.
There's no perfect solution to the problem. But, these basic security measures still are necessary, as they can help.
Good post. Concur.
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