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Defending American Schools

10/12/2013

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I’ve been thinking on this post and writing it for a long time.  The tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School completely held up my blogging until I cleared my reactions from my mental buffer.  On our way driving to Ohio for Christmas 2012, we passed through Newtown by chance, and from the turnpike one of my daughters saw one of the huge funeral processions.  The sensationalized media event was suddenly a grim, matter-of-fact reality.

Over the months, I sat and watched reactions play out in the professional media and social media. I kept my lips (and fingertips) shut. I wasn’t sure how to react. I wasn’t sure what to say. I watched the parade of reactions, assertions, accusations, defenses, speculations, and speeches. None of them seemed right. Most seemed oversimplified, illogical, and belligerent. And the media threw itself on the conflagration like gasoline, building its coverage of the event upon a foundation of juxtaposition and using the word “versus” a lot. Finding the most tactless and extreme spokespersons on every side of the multi-faceted topic attracted viewers I suppose. But it did nothing to foster a workable response to these rare but extreme acts of ultraviolence.

Since that time, several more tragic incidents have occurred and many more near-incidents have been deterred, though certainly not as widely reported as those that come to fruition. After hearing of a couple of close calls, I've finally decided now is the time to share these thoughts, during a time of relative calm – not during the shock and grief of a new tragedy.

People and organizations have made wild remarks about putting armed guards, military or police, in all schools; or fortifying schools against attackers like some institutionalized version of I Am Legend. No thought is given to the economic burden of maintaining such measures, nor to the psychological impact on our children (and teachers) of having to attend a daily reverse prison with armed guards, asking mommy and daddy “should I be scared to go to school?”

I propose something less than the police-state schools proposed by the NRA and something more than an unregulated self-choice method of arming teachers. I think placing police in every school is economically impractical and, we hope, a waste of a highly trained crime-interdiction professional to mostly act as a scarecrow and security guard.*

A quick Google search turns up some suggestion that there are as many as 99,000 public education institutions in America (kindergarten through college graduate schools). If, in a given year, you had "school shootings" in just one percent of schools, that would be 990 events. Roughly three per day. Although the media scours the country to present us with plenty of horror, the toll is far short of three per day. We are dealing with a very, very small number of incidents, calling into question the necessity, wisdom, and cost of altering society to try to reduce the number of incidents to absolute zero (which I believe is impossible). This is the classic "zero-to-infinity" problem. On any given day, in any given school, the chances of a school shooting are almost zero. But if it occurs, the consequences are infinite - so horrible it shakes the nation and motivates scrambling knee-jerk legislation at the highest levels and a willingness to relinquish personal liberties for an illusion of heightened safety.   


Despite what may be a copycat wave we are experiencing right now, school shootings are pretty rare. So the cost and resource drain of placing at least 99,000 police officers into our schools (obviously big schools and campuses need more than one) seems to be overkill. It would be similar to maintaining our peak nuclear arsenal after the demise of the USSR. Remember the widespread demand for undercover sky marshals on every plane after September 11? After a while we wondered how many flights really had armed sky marshals on board. It was admitted not all – rather a random sampling such that terrorists would be deterred by the possibility. Now, in 2013, I wonder how many flights have sky marshals. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was none. I don’t hear anyone still actively asking the question.

Even Newtown, Connecticut residents, on April 23, 2013, balked at increasing the municipal budget to hire additional police and unarmed security guards for the town’s seven schools. [article here] That vote took place on the very same day that Newtown officers visited Maine to speak at the Augusta Civic Center for the 5th Annual Maine Partners in Emergency Preparedness Conference. Ironically, their top recommendation for protecting schools was a fully trained school resource officer in every school. [article here]

Increasing this burden, I argue that any place with uniformed guards would need at least two, stationed in different locations, to overcome the element of surprise. Because on the one day in a guard’s ten-year tenure when the shooter walks up, it is likely that the first guard will be complacent from years of boring days and will be the first victim. A second guard elsewhere in the school will perhaps hear the shot and have time to switch to fight mode.

At the other end of the spectrum is the near-vigilante, Wild West kind of approach, saying to teachers and/or administrators, “Okay, whoever wants to carry a gun at school, go ahead.” Whoa! Gun owners, like drivers, come in all levels of ability and all levels of vanity about their own skills. Many teachers and professors (and members of any cross-section of the populace) have no business wielding a gun in a public setting. Even the concealed weapon licensing programs in some states require only a paltry level of weapons proficiency, law, and safety knowledge.

So, who does society accept standing around a school with a gun? Who are we comfortable with? Who are we not shocked to see standing in the hallway with an openly displayed deadly weapon, fully loaded and ready to deploy within a second? Well, the aforementioned police. Why are we comfortable with that?**

We accept police carrying firearms in all environments because we at least believe that they have had a criminal background check, analysis of their character and fitness, psychological evaluation, education and training, and have physical fitness level necessary to deploy their weapon and keep it from being taken from them by force and used against them. This training, at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy takes about 720 hours over 18 weeks. The full curriculum is here: http://www.maine.gov/dps/mcja/training/basiclaw/curriculum.htm

Well, what if you took just those aspects of this training related specifically to firearms training, tactics, and emergency management, and offered an optional certification program to teachers, administrators, education majors, and college professors to become trained as “School Security Specialists”? The curriculum and training would NOT include how to write effective police reports, how to apprehend suspects, how to arrest, how to conduct a safe traffic stop, how to frisk people, how to search for drugs, how to recognize intoxication and drug use, or what constitutes a crime and when to intervene. Perhaps, in the place of the criminal justice and patrol aspects of the curriculum, you would add training specifically focusing on prior school shootings, mistakes made, and develop tactics and plans for such scenarios. And there would be ongoing training and practice to maintain the certification - continuing education like that in many professions - including a lot of firearms and tactical practice under conditions mimicking the stress of a real-life attack on a school.  The curriculum and ongoing training ought to be a uniform national standard.

In their eventual jobs these graduates would primarily be teachers, not cops. They would not intervene with firepower to stop a car burglary, or a theft of a computer, or embezzlement. They would not search for drugs or bust kids for alcohol violations. All that would be handled with a phone call to the full-time police. The school security officers’ only purpose would be to return fire in the event of a school shooting situation, with a goal to stop, delay, suppress, and obfuscate the attacker until the attacker was disabled or dead, or until a full police force could arrive. The local police would know which teachers in the school were the security officers so as to reduce the risk of arriving on the scene and mistaking the security officers for the assailants.*** Perhaps they’d have some kind of badge to display to the police to identify their role when the cops arrived. The school security officers and the police would develop plans for coordinated response to school violence incidents.

The graduates could expect, with this certification, to command a higher salary and to be more marketable as employees. It will take some years, of course, before there is a pool of individuals large enough to provide trained personnel to all 99,000 schools. Any sustainable rational solution will take longer than knee-jerk panaceas. Additionally, may institutions will choose not to hire any such security specialists.

Once such a body of such educators exists, each individual school, school district, university, or college can make their own decision about whether to hire such people, pay them more, how many to hire, etc. based upon the infinite variables of each location, including school size, demographics, attitude of the parents and community, and more. Essentially, each community can then balance the risks of the zero-to-infinity problem for themselves, but have on the table a reasonably affordable, reasonably safe method of employing armed protection for our educational institutions, which are salient targets essentially because they are places where large groups of vulnerable people congregate regularly on a predictable schedule. And during the 99.9% of school hours that are peaceful and unremarkable, you'd still have a productive educator giving your children your money's worth.

None of this will reduce the number of school shootings to zero. But perhaps it is a balanced, practical, and sustainable approach to guarding against the infinite consequences of the terrible acts of the insane, the impassioned, and the wicked directed at our educational institutions. This proposal is not meant to be exclusive. By all means, effort needs to be made to keep weapons out of the hands of nuts and mental health care (like health care generally) needs a lot of work. And more needs to be done to rehabilitate troubled and broken American families. And I do believe that the extreme violence of a lot modern movies and video games (even though I enjoy some of them) is more than necessary to convey creative expression and, if watched repeatedly by a marginalized, unbalanced person, might give them the kernel of a very bad idea.

This proposal is only for a system of last resort, when all the other measures (should we responsibly implement them) have still failed. This also does not address the problem of other public places of gathering - restaurants, movie theaters, malls, etc., which are beyond the scope of this article.

After hours of driving around thinking on this in idle moments, and watching the scene in the mornings after dropping my daughters off at their junior high and high schools, and after considering my wife’s role as a high school teacher and what could be done that might offer me any increased sense of security - well, that’s the best I’ve got. 


*There are those who are completely dismissive of the idea of armed security in schools. They employ an illogical argument, stating, “Well, there was an armed guard (or police) at Columbine. And at Virginia Tech.” Well, that led me to Google up those incidents. True. And the armed guards either fired and missed the killer, or were perhaps not persistent enough when their target passed from their view. But if that argument were applied on a larger scope it would lead to the conclusion that because there was one successful murder yesterday, armed police are useless, and therefore we should disband all of our armed police departments because they obviously can’t stop killings. My retort is that perhaps those police/guards should have spent more time practicing - or that sometimes you’re just stuck taking a shot with a pistol from 50 yards away, and that’s a tough shot. But that's not a rational reason not to try.

**This goes to the NRA’s swaggering cowboy statement, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” I can just hear that in John Wayne’s voice. There was, of course, a reflexive outcry over that remark - just because of who it came from, and because the timing and tone of it was tactless. Again, the Columbine and Virginia Tech failures of “good guys” were pointed to as proving this statement untrue. And yet, if you or I saw a “bad guy with a gun” lurking around the school, or our yard, or your neighbors’ yard, or the supermarket, who ya gonna call? Not Ghostbusters (good guys, but no guns). You'd call the police (good guys with guns). And in fact, in a recent presentation in Maine, Newtown police officers essentially echoed this, making their top recommendation for protecting American schools a fully trained school resource [police] officer in every one. (cited above) Further, our nation’s self-defense laws are generally structured in this way, permitting law-abiding citizens (good guys) to employ deadly force only in the face of threatened deadly force (or other life-threatening actions) by criminals (bad guys). I therefore find the basic premise sound, and it is the underlying assumption behind any proposals to install police or even soldiers in school settings. I feel my proposal is a more reasonable and affordable approach.

***Whether students, parents, and the general public would be privy to the identity of the school security specialists, and whether the security officers’ weapons would be carried openly or concealed, is a matter about which I have not yet formed a conclusion. As a friend of mine expressed it, “Why does Mr. Smith always wear a sport-coat?”

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The Forgotten Justification

2/16/2012

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Tonight, I was watching a Facebook exchange about gun rights and the Second Amendment.  I started to chime in, but became aware that my post was growing to a length that seemed to violate Facebook etiquette by monopolizing the Wall of the poor man who had started the conversation.  So instead, I make my full length remark here, on my own turf, as follows:

I have to chime in to point out a reason for the Second Amendment that I am continually shocked does not come up during these debates.  Our Founding Fathers were revolutionaries.  They revolted against an organized and crown-funded army.  They were only successful in this revolt because they were able to muster weapons roughly equivalent in technological advancements and deadliness to that of the British regulars.  Having succeeded, they knew the importance of being armed in order to secure their liberty in the face of a tyrannical and insensitive government bent on using the nation's armed forces to destroy them.  Now, as we have seen, an unarmed populace under a totalitarian regime like China, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Egypt, etc. has little chance against an obedient dictator's armed forces if they do not have weaponry sufficient to at least have a fighting chance of acquiring the next higher order of weaponry.  For instance, with a rifle, patience, and the proper training, one can acquire a tank.  

Now, therefore, an armed U.S. populace is really the unspoken last line of defense against a government gone wild enough to call out U.S. armed forces against its own people, should that ever occur (there's a couple of small examples in our history I believe).  So when you are considering whether the U.S. populace should be disarmed in the name of safety, you must stop to ask yourself "Do I completely and forever trust my government to do the right thing and respect my wishes and my freedom?"  If your response is a snort, then you have no doubt studied history.

Note, I am not suggesting that a revolt is currently appropriate (should the Dept. of Homeland Security be monitoring this blog).  There are a few groups in Wyoming and such who are ready to go for it right now.  I'm just not with them on that at this time.  I'd call them...well...nuts.

Also, there must be a balance between the destructive power of the weapons possessed by the populace and that needed to secure this unspoken check on government might.  For instance, I would not suggest citizens possess hand grenades, rocket launchers, or suitcase nukes.  Nor even large caliber fully automatic machine guns.  But I do think that semiautomatic assault rifles are a tolerable compromise.  They would afford a fighting chance against the kind of military likely to be deployed against the populace, yet (if you have experience with firearms) are not really very different from hunting and sportsmen's rifles except in cosmetic appearance.  Assault weapons are ugly and for that reason spark fear in those unfamiliar with them and a misguided belief that they are deadlier than more elegant looking hunting rifles.  Handguns are largely useless in combat situations, and not even a best choice for self-defense.  They are simply a compromise when carrying around a rifle or a shotgun is too cumbersome.  

People who do not have experience with firearms also mistake the ability to fire a lot of shots for deadliness.  There are many accounts of shootouts with hundreds of rounds fired and few to no hits.  It's like an episode of the A-Team or something.  Most of the time, when I read of shooting rampages, I am just thankful that the perpetrator was not one of the kind of people I grew up around - competitive shooters.  If they were, there would be a lot fewer shots fired and a lot higher death toll.  Notably, I don't know of any incidents of highly trained marksmen and practical or self-defense shooter-types going nuts and shooting up a place.   But anyway, the deadliest people in the past and current armed forces of all nations are snipers.  They focus on a one-shot, one kill goal.  Accuracy means a rifle and the proper training.  That rifle only needs to hold one round.  Movies depict a fantasy of wildly spraying a scene with a machine gun, without aiming, one-handed, from hip level and hoards of people falling down dead.  Anyone who has actually fired a sub-machine knows that they're a hoot to shoot, but it's damn hard to hit your intended target.  They're showy, but overrated.

I have no interest at all in hunting.  It is boring and there's lots of icky guts to deal with at the end.  I like my meat clean and packaged at the store.  But I strongly support the right to bear arms.  That said, if you are not willing to learn how to properly use a firearm, how to be safe with them, or you are afraid of them, then you have no business owning one.  You will only hurt yourself or others.  

People kill tons of strangers, friends, family members, and themselves with automobiles.  They do it carelessly and in fits of rage.  Yet we tolerate that even though automobiles have only justifications of convenience and economics.

So anyway, when I think of a rational basis for possession of firearms by the populace, hunting is my last go-to argument.  In fact, I don't go to it.  Self-defense against crime is #2.  A pretty solid argument in my viewpoint, but its compellingness (is that a word?) varies depending on whether you live in rural Maine or a really bad part of L.A.

And let me point out that much of the violence committed with firearms (and without for that matter) emanates from the extensive organized crime created by the Drug War - my other pet political issue.  So much so that I can't believe the NRA has not teamed up with LEAP to advocate for legalization and regulation of drugs.  Drug violence gives guns a bad rep. 

If you've read all of this, thank you for your attention.
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    Tom lives on the east side of the Kennebec River and works on the west.  He relocated from Arizona to Maine, by pure choice,  in 2001 and loves music and history.  He may change any viewpoint expressed on this site at will and without warning.

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