Those Americans who listened to President Obama’s condolence speech to the families of the victims of the latest mass shooting no doubt had a wide range of reaction, as did I. At the beginning, in a very real way, I felt a moment of pity for President Obama the man. As he so accurately stated, his job has been to try to offer his personal grief, and America’s support to the families of too many victims of too many crimes. I can’t imagine how immensely difficult that must have been.
I do not, nor will I ever subscribe to the governing philosophy demonstrated by President Obama during his first term in office. The following remarks should be taken with that in mind.
Another caveat; at this writing, a week and a half past the slaughter, the events of that day are still being investigated. Eventually we should know every move made on that day and that will help the national discussion that must follow.
This much is clear at this point; a man armed himself with his mother’s rifle and pistols, killed her and made his way to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and killed 20 children and 6 adults before killing himself. I don’t know why he did what he did and I am skeptical we ever will.
I choose to believe that the killer was mentally incapacitated in some way. That verdict is far from certain at this point. Apparently you don’t have to be deranged to perpetrate unspeakable acts. Educated doctors and nurses were certainly not mentally incapacitated when conducting experiments on living, non-anesthetized human patients during Hitler’s mass slaughter.
In his speech, President Obama seemed to call for more gun legislation. This piece is a response to that call.
Here are some of the solutions I have heard advanced. Should we away the guns of all citizens? This is an achievable goal contrary to what any gun lobby or talking head says. It has been done before in countries where the individual right to own a gun was the law of the land.
And if the political will is there, just a 60 vote majority in the Senate can pass such a law. This is in itself unlikely with the current structure of the US House of Representatives.
Of course, I have chosen to completely ignore the fact that the individual right to own a gun is without ambiguity enshrined in the Constitution where its presence was discovered by the Supreme Court just a few years ago.
This same Constitution is increasingly irrelevant though and left for students to discover in the backs of their Civics texts and nowhere else. Once discovered, students are shocked to see how little regard our elected officials hold for the document.
Taking guns away from the citizens would be possible but not likely. Even passing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Second Amendment is possible but extremely unlikely. As I have already stated, there is just no point in going through the amendment process to overturn a right that is already considered to be one right too many by our elected officials. And so, legislation accomplishing this is the easiest method.
An outright ban is probably off the table, but why not limit each person to one hunting rifle--make it a single shot, and one hunting shotgun--again a single shot. Would that limit the damage that a determined killer could do? Maybe.
Should we limit the number of guns a person can buy at any one time? Maybe we could pass a law restricting any person’s purchase to two guns a month. The Sandy Hook killer would need just two months to get his ‘arsenal’.
Maybe we should pass a law banning the sale, use, or possession of clips or magazines that hold more than ten rounds each. There are quite a few of those already in the country, but let’s say that we pass that law and confiscate all of those clips which hold over ten rounds. Wouldn’t a killer bring more clips? Maybe a killer would just bring a couple more guns with them and discard them as each runs out of ammunition.
You could pass any number of new gun laws and do so sincerely without realizing that the Sandy Hook killer already decided to do something illegal anyway. It is too early to tell if he knew right from wrong but my best guess is that he knew what he was doing was wrong and that killing his mother was against the law. If you try to pass new more restrictive gun laws, it should go without saying that you will only restrict those who will already obey the law.
It bears mentioning here that while our elected officials may call for more gun restrictions and do so with the good intention of trying to prevent another tragedy, I challenge them to lead the way and be the first to give up their armed protection. Most of our elected officials are protected by armed security guards when at work and many of them have their own armed security detachment twenty-four hours a day. If guns are bad, they are bad for everyone. My family is just as important as theirs.
I should probably address the assault rifle myth here as well. I know people who have ‘assault rifles’. Those rifles just aren’t black or built on the AR platform. In fact I know a man with an ‘assault’ shotgun. It isn’t black either, but are we going to ban these also? So what really is an ‘assault’ rifle?
True assault rifles have a selector switch that makes them fully automatic--a feature that is legal for only those permit holders allowed to possess one--and rare is the case of a permit holder using their fully automatic weapon to commit a crime. The fully automatic action shoots as long as the trigger is held or the ammunition runs out. The semi-automatic action allows a shot every time the trigger is pulled until the ammunition runs out. Those who insist on calling these rifles ‘assault’ rifles are only demonstrating their ignorance. ‘Assault-style rifle’ is a more accurate description but still extremely misleading, and I think purposely so.
Another thing about President Obama’s speech that troubled me is his apparent grief, undoubtedly sincere, over the deaths of these people...especially the children. I shared that grief with him momentarily. Then I remembered the deaths of more than fifty million children in an unprecedented slaughter of the innocents no less horrifying than those deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary. President Obama to my knowledge sheds no tears over that outrage.
In fact, candidate Obama in a town hall meeting in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 2008 told the audience that if his daughter made a mistake and got pregnant, he would not want her to be punished with a baby. With a little digging you can discover another approach taken by our current President. He voted against the Born Alive Act. This was a law that required a doctor to treat a child who was born alive despite an abortionists efforts to kill him or her.
It seems clear to me under the Fourteenth Amendment that these children are American citizens at birth and are entitled to the protections in the Constitution including the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. It is clear to me what Barack Obama thinks of children. With this in mind, his reaction to the tragic deaths of the Sandy Hook children ring false to me.
If we were to ban all guns, or limit the number of people with access to guns, or severely limit the type and lethality of the guns people can have, killers will use fertilizer and diesel fuel or propane tanks and cell phones.
We have few options open to us.
After much thought I have come to the conclusion that arming educators just might be the most effective deterrent to school shootings. And at the risk of having a British citizen calling me a stupid man, I believe this to be the most effective deterrent. I confess to a bit of nationalism here. I heard recently of an exchange between a talk show host, Piers Morgan, and an invited guest during which the guest made some suggestions to deal with the problem of gun violence.
The British citizen, perhaps forgetting the effect his country’s insistence that American rights were less important than the rights of British subjects had on the Colonists, lectured his invited guest about his views and then insulted the guest. This crass lack of civility and the resort to invective has led me to disregard any opinions this host espouses. It was certainly unworthy of the host who, until that time, seemed to be highly regarded.
I know many people have already rejected the idea of arming educators. It is time to take a closer look. Let me talk to you as an educator, currently in my 35th year.
In my career, I have seen decades worth of rifles and shotguns on high school campuses across my home state of Montana. I guessed of the presence of handguns but never actually saw one there. Of course, I am referring to pickup trucks with gun racks in the back window. Far from being concerned about this, I took their presence to be a matter of course. This is Montana, a place where a student can usually get in a little shooting or hunting after school. So, in Montana, guns were an accepted part of the culture,
That was then. Now, even in Montana, the presence of a gun anywhere near a school is justifiably cause for alarm and maybe even panic.
If a killer were to make his or her way into virtually any school in America, they would find almost no resistance. Our school has an armed School Resource Officer on duty every day. Last week, our SRO was joined by another armed officer. So, my school had 2 guns in the hands of trained professionals. I felt safer (as did my students) under those circumstances than if there were no guns on campus.
I absolutely trust that any intruder that tried to cause harm at our school would have been met with accurate fire and his or her attack prevented or blunted.
Why not give our SRO’s some help? I wonder how many shootings would have been prevented if the killers thought they would meet any resistance. The effectiveness of a deterrent by its nature is hard to quantify. So, the presence of armed educators, not the actual use of their weapons, may have the desired effect.
Just the other day a friend of mine and I were talking about the Sandy Hook shootings. Horrified, we talked candidly about the available options. He and I don’t really see eye to eye politically so it was bound to be an interesting conversation. This was a conversation, by the way, that took place in the immediate presence of three guns and maybe fifty rounds of ammunition. This was enough to be described as an ‘arsenal’ by the media.
My good friend flatly rejected the idea of arming teachers. He remembered the shooting at the entrance to the Empire State Building in New York City where trained professional policemen had wounded 9 bystanders attempting to stop a man who had just killed someone with whom he had a quarrel. By the way, the gun the murderer used had been purchased legally in Florida but this man was using the gun illegally as he had no permit to carry in New York.
My friend’s conclusion was that even trained professionals can’t fire accurately under stress.
The trouble with that assessment is that the trained professionals did fire accurately enough to kill the murderer at the Empire State Building. That they fired 16 rounds to do it and that bystanders got hurt was unfortunate but maybe predictable given the nature and location of the incident.
I don’t think that disqualifies the idea of arming teachers. I submit that the fact of arming the teachers on a voluntary basis will prevent them from having to use their guns.
Besides, if an armed intruder were to get into a school, it doesn’t really matter what type of firearm or clip or ammunition they have, the death and pain will be extensive. Perhaps not as extensive if a trained educator limits the damage a killer can do. Another factor comes to mind here. On our staff, there are two veterans who are trained with sidearms. My guess is that many school staffs have a similar percentage of people trained to use firearms under stress.
But lets say that my friend is correct. That arming teachers is not a viable option as teachers are trained to teach, not kill. I would still want to be armed. It beats hiding and praying that the killer took a different path and wouldn’t be coming to harm my students.
Leaving us with only the options of hiding or running presupposes that someone or something else is responsible for our safety. I reject that idea on many grounds. The first is that I am responsible for the safety and security of my family and frankly my students. Even the unbelievably quick response at Sandy Hook failed to prevent 26 deaths. Only someone on site could have limited the damage and without a School Resource Officer or two at every school it seems to me that we have only one option.
It should also be clear that the guns should not be kept hidden in a safe in the classroom or the office. They would have no deterrent effect there. No, if we are going to arm the teachers and administrators, they should carry their own weapons in plain sight with easy and quick access.
There are of course other things to consider like better, more vigilant reporting for those unstable people who have access to guns and of course the violent video game connection. Those are topics for another time.
For now the available options are grim, but we don’t have to be helpless. And in the end, I believe that those people who right now are advocating for disarming the American people would prefer safety over liberty. Those who would prefer to not arm themselves have that right. They do not have the right to disarm me.
Further, they that would prefer safety over liberty do not deserve the title of citizen.