As the number of school shootings in this country seems to grow exponentially, there is one dog that hasn’t barked. That is there has never been a shooting in a school where teachers and staff are known to be armed. As far as my research can tell, there has not even been an attempted shooting.
This does not include schools with uniformed police “resource officers” who can be easily identified and avoided or neutralized by a shooter at a security checkpoint. Resource officers tend to be retired cops or those deemed unfit for normal patrol duty. They are generally good for keeping potentially rowdy students in line and detecting hidden weapons, but if a shooter comes in with guns blazing, they will likely be the first target hit.
I have studied mass shootings since 2017 and I have seen patterns. These incidents are formally referred to as active shooter incidents, an odd bureaucratic terminology. Is there any such thing as a passive shooter?
The reason for armed faculty is deterrence, not gunfights. Prospective shooters look for soft targets. Most are cowards in some way, even those who commit suicide following the carnage that they created. A school shooting is a one-shot deal, and the last thing the shooter wants is to be surprised by someone else with a gun and thwarted before he has done the deed. A school where some teachers and/or staff are advertised to be armed presents the potential gunman — yes, the vast majority of shooters are young males — with a situation where the potential for failure is unacceptably high. That is real deterrence.
There seem to be some “best practices” for schools that have successfully armed teachers and staff. First, it should be advertised that some employees are armed. Second, those with weapons should not be identified by name or classroom; otherwise, a well-prepared potential gunman could avoid them — or worse — target them first in whatever building they are in. Finally, those who volunteer to be armed are required to go through and pass a certified combat shooting course. Because an incident has never happened at such an institution, it is impossible to measure the effect of deterrence because you can’t prove the negative case. But the lack of incidents should say volumes.
Why then, have not more school districts adopted such a program? The answer is liberalism. Liberal parents, teachers, and teachers’ unions band together to oppose such programs, allowing their children to be ripe for slaughter on the premise that a gun in anyone’s hand is inherently bad. When the massacre inevitably occurs; rather than blaming themselves, they call for more gun control, mental health programs, and Red Flag laws. This is the David Hogg approach. Hogg — the fallen Democratic Party Vice Chair — predicts panic and chaos if a teacher is ever forced to open fire. We’ll never know until it happens; if it happens.
At some point, some psycho will probably test the system at a faculty-armed school, taking it as a challenge. I hope that it will be far in the future. If it happens, we will see if the Hogg scenario plays out. Actually, Hogg also predicts that in the chaos, an armed faculty or staff member might freeze as did the police resource officer at the Stoneman-Douglas. Hogg was a student there. It is impossible to predict what any individual will do in a real danger situation. As with cops and the military, you can only train them well and trust that they will do the right thing in a crisis. In many instances, unarmed teachers have covered their students with their bodies. Hogg tends to forget that.
Deterrence worked during the Cold War, but the leaders of the U.S. and USSR were not psychotic teens hyped up on social media. So far, deterrence is working at those schools with armed teachers and faculty. That opens up plenty of liberal school districts with innocent targets just waiting to be shot. For the prospective shooter, there are so many targets and so little time. Liberal parents, teachers, and administrators are just hoping that the next massacre will not be their school. But hope is not a strategy; it is a crap shoot.
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