BLUF:
I have a fairly good imagination and we can imagine all kinds of problems that might exist with armed school staff. Before our imagination runs wild, consider that we already have several thousand man-years of experience with armed staff in schools. We wouldn’t notice that because concealed firearms are concealed. I have been in the training classes with school staff who volunteered to go armed on campus. The teachers and SROs talked to me after class. They were exactly the levelheaded people we want protecting our children. They would stop a bullet with their body to protect their kids.
Now we’ve given them a chance to save our children and a chance to go home alive. The greatest threat our children face is a politician and a journalist who can tell a biased story and leave the kids unprotected. That is another story for another time, but we have more challenges to face.
Why They Murder Our Kids, and How to Stop the Next School Attack
Life tests our character and we are both the ant and grasshopper from Aesop’s fable. We both prepare and we procrastinate. We face a similar choice when it comes to protecting our children at school. Some of us planned and prepared ahead of time to protect our children, and some of us put that off for another day. What is worse is that some unprepared adults will blame the next mass murder at school on the citizens who took steps to protect their children from harm. Fortunately for all of us we know how to stop mass murder in our schools. That wasn’t always true. Defending our children at school was both a discovery and an invention. I’ve studied school safety for the last decade and this is some of what we’ve learned.
Mass murder is designed to shocks us, yet most of us ignore why these murderers kill our kids. Fewer of us act to take away the murderer’s motivation. Only a few of us work to put an effective defense in our schools. Mass murder strikes at all of our hearts, but a dedicated handful of people worked for years to make our children safer. It was hard work. It remains hard work.
Comparing mass murder to a natural disaster, it is easier to write detailed fire codes and seismic requirements for our schools than to admit that some people who look like us will deliberately hurt our children. Mass murder makes us feel helpless. We have to look evil in the face and not flinch. The good news is that we know exactly what to do to stop the next mass murderer in his tracks.
Murder is an ancient problem. We have laws against taking an innocent life but those laws are ineffective against someone who doesn’t care if they get killed. In the past, killing innocent victims was usually motivated by politics and religion and resulted in terrorists attacks. Planning your own suicide to include the death of a number of unrelated innocent parties is relatively new. We had to make a new name for it. This celebrity-murder was spawned by the news media that turned the murderer into an overnight sensation.
As peculiar as celebrity-murder sounds, we’ve seen similar behavior. We saw teenagers kill themselves so that they would be talked about on the local television news and in local newspapers. Teen suicides would cluster as one depressed teen wanted the attention given to the previous suicide. These troubled kids would rather be dead than live with the feeling of being ignored. We learned to keep these teens alive by not mentioning the name or showing the picture of the teenager who took his own life.
We reduced teen celebrity-suicide when we denied the teenagers the notoriety they were dying to get.
We can trace the growth celebrity-murders back to the attacks in Dunblane, Scotland and then to Port Arthur, Australia. It was 1999 when we saw celebrity-murder jump to the US with the attack at the high school in Columbine, Colorado. Old investigative reports found over 80 copycat attempts following the attack at Columbine. I’m sure the number of copycats is far higher by now.
If you doubt that celebrity-murder is real, then remember how the media idolized the two terrorists who set off a pressure-cooker bomb at the 2013 Boston Marathon. The media gave the murders a public relations campaign worth tens-of-millions-of-dollars. In response, thousands of attentions-starved teens wondered what they would have to do so it would be their face on the news.
The solution to stop celebrity-murder should be as easy as repeating what we did to radically reduce teen celebrity-suicide. What makes the solution harder is that few politicians will scold the press and hold them accountable for sensationalizing the mass murderer. The politician depends on the news media for campaign coverage.. and the press feeds the politician’s ego. I think that is why so few politicians will promote legislation to punish the news media when the press creates celebrity murderers.
Given our flawed political and media climate, we might think that the situation is hopeless if we want to stop someone who wants to kill others and then kill themselves. Threatening the murderer with punishment certainly doesn’t work. That means increased criminal penalties are ineffective. The murderers will study and plan for years. That means that mandatory waiting periods for firearms don’t work either. We’ve seen these murderers kill their family members to get a gun. We’ve seen mass murderers lie to school counselors and psychiatrists, so the murderer is not looking for help with their personal problems. That limits the therapeutic model of stopping mass murderers. In fact, many of the murderers feel superior to the rest of us because of their skill in deception and in manipulating others. A firearms background check looks backwards, and mass murder is simply not a long-term career choice.
We discovered the solution to stop mass murders in schools almost by accident, but the discovery wasn’t simple. Fortunately, we had lots of people looking for a solution. The obvious place to turn for expertise at protecting our children was to ask the people who carried guns at school every day as part of their job. The process of discovery started when we asked school resource officers what they could do to stop mass murder in our schools.
There is a strong strain of professionalism in law enforcement when it comes to learning from the experience of other agencies. Administrators studied what worked and what failed. Someone asked the organization that studied school resource officers to see if an SRO could stop a mass murderer. The answer offered a ray of hope.
Yes, the SRO is an effective deterrent. Unfortunately, he is in uniform so he is easily identified. All the attacker had to do was wait for the SRO to go to lunch or until the SRO was at the opposite end of campus. The multiple attackers at Columbine, Colorado drove the single uniformed officer off campus with their gunfire. These researchers determined that time was the critical factor in stopping an attack. Whatever solution would stop the attacker had to be inside the building before the first shot was fired. Every other solution took too long and left too many of our children dead or injured.
After the attack in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, we had tens-of-thousands of school boards and school principals calling their local sheriff or their police chief. They asked for armed officers in every school. Time is so critical that the school officials wanted an armed officer in every building.
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