Saving Our School Children from Tennessee Politicians

Tennessee politicians left our students defenseless, and we have to save them. A celebrity-seeking mass murderer killed students in a Nashville private school. That should be a wakeup call that the Republican controlled legislature and Governor have failed us again. We need angry parents to change the status quo and save our kids. As grim as this sounds, there is plenty of good news. We also know how to reduce and to prevent mass murder in our schools. Tennessee parents have been ignored for too long.

The gun-control politicians say we should disarm honest citizens to protect our children. Other politicians say they will put armed deputies in the schools to save our kids. Both have been lying to us for years. Gun-control fails and the legislature never funds enough school resource officers to protect our kids. I understand the problem because mass-murders are rare and even a small school needs several defenders. The solution is simple, but it is not politically easy.

I want our children protected at school the same way our kids are protected by their parents at home. I want our children protected the way our politicians are protected at the capital, and I want it now. Unlike some proposals that sound good in theory, we know this solution stops mass-murderers. Don’t listen to what politicians and celebrities say they want. Instead, look at what they do.

Politicians are protected by men with guns. Celebrities are protected by men with guns. The spouses and children of politicians and the spouses and children of celebrities are protected by men with guns. When a celebrity-seeking mass-murderer comes to school, even the advocates of gun-control shout that we should call men with guns. The only debate is about when the armed defenders should arrive. I want our kids defended now.

The experts who study violence on campus told us what to do to protect our students. It was a decade ago when they said we don’t have time to wait. The defenders have to be on campus before the first shot is fired or the murderer will kill more than 14 children while we wait for the police. The experts said that defenders have to be close enough to the students so they arrive in seconds, not minutes. That is simply a matter of elementary school mathmatics. The murderers will kill until we stop them, but the experts didn’t know that we can do something so the murderers won’t kill at all.

More parents want their children protected at school than want them unprotected. You might think that volunteer defenders at school are rare, but you would be wonderfully wrong. It surprised me too, but we found a higher fraction of teachers who were willing to be armed first responders than the fraction of people who carry concealed in public. (18 percent of teachers vs. 8.0 percent of the general public)

Listen to what that says! It seems that more school staff were willing to protect their kids at school than were willing to protect themselves in public. Unfortunately, Tennessee politicians got in the way of saving our kids. The Tennessee Legislature outlawed almost all school staff from going armed. We can’t stop the murders in Nashville a few months ago, but we can stop the murderers from attacking our kids tomorrow if we change those laws.

Armed defenders are old news. We’ve had armed volunteer first responders in schools across the country for a decade. About 34 states allow volunteer armed school staff to be first responders at their schools. One program trains these responders in armed defense, first aid, and in emergency response. They trained about three-thousand first responders in over 200 school districts. We’ve had about two-million school-hours of armed defenders on campus. We have seen what stops celebrity-seeking mass-murderers so we don’t need to speculate.

• The threat to our children is real; thirty people died in mass-murders at schools last year (from May to May.)
• Armed defense works; a school with a publicly announced program of armed volunteer staff has never been attacked.
• None of the trained volunteers have killed an innocent person on campus in the entire history of the program (reaching back a decade.)

Despite those facts, Sheriffs and legislators in Tennessee want to guarantee that only law enforcement and retired law enforcement are allowed to go armed at school. That works for them, but we know that doesn’t work for the kids. We saw law enforcement fail to act time after time in Florida and Texas. We saw children die when School Resource Officers were off campus or at lunch. We saw mass murderers attack the SROs before they attacked the students.

In contrast, we’ve never seen the combination of a uniformed School Resource Officer and concealed volunteers fail to stop a mass-murderer. Our children could be safer next week if parents were standing in the legislator’s office today demanding that the kids be defended at school. It really is that simple.

Being a legislator isn’t easy. Tennessee politicians are afraid of what might happen, and I understand that. They are worried that the press will question the risk of armed school staff. Tennessee politicians are worried that sheriffs might object to citizens going armed at school the same way they go armed in public and at other jobs. Those politicians will do the right thing once they are more afraid of our questions than they are afraid of questions from the press.

I think this decision is easy. I’d much rather face a hard question from a reporter than have to explain why I left an unprotected child to die in his classroom. So far, we have three dead children and three dead adults in Nashville because the Tennessee legislature left them to die. Let’s stop that right now.