At Penn Live: Here’s what Pa. can do to stop the next school shooting

Apr 14, 2018 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed piece at Penn Live (the PA Media Group, including the Harrisburg Patriot-News newspaper).  His piece starts this way:

Instead of solving the problem of violence in their halls, Pennsylvania schools are becoming a national punchline.

This week, one school district announced it will arm teachers with miniature 16-inch long baseball bats. Another district recently placed 5-gallon buckets of rocks in classrooms so students could defend themselves in the event of an attack.

Americans desperately want to do something to stop these attacks, though polls indicate strong skepticism about new gun control laws.

The Pennsylvania Legislature is considering bills that are useless or would cause more harm than good.

Background checks on private transfers of guns, so-called universal background checks, wouldn’t have stopped the attack in Florida or any of the other mass public shootings in this century. Virtually all the 3 million people who have been stopped from buying guns by background checks are law-abiding people who were mistakenly identified as prohibited people.

We already tried a federal assault weapons ban for 10 years. Even research paid for by the Clinton administration didn’t find any benefit. Other studies have found state bans to be unsuccessful.

Unfortunately, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has threatened to veto legislation that could make a real difference by giving trained staff members real ways of defending their schools. Rocks and miniature bats just aren’t going to cut it.

Nationwide, parents of K-12 aged children are surprisingly supportive of arming teachers.

After the Parkland shooting, a Rasmussen survey showed 59 percent supported President Donald Trump’s proposal to give teachers monetary incentives to carry guns in school. 54 percent of adults without schoolchildren oppose the idea. Overall, slightly more people oppose than support the idea

Putting an officer in each school is very costly and not an effective solution. Police are crucial in the fight against crime, but their uniforms are like neon signs reading, “Shoot me first.” If teachers carry concealed firearms, attackers won’t know who is armed. They won’t know who they need to attack first.

More than 98 percent of US mass public shootings since 1950 have taken place in gun-free zones.

This includes right-to-carry states, where licensed individuals can carry virtually anywhere. But time and again, attacks occur in those tiny areas where permitted concealed handguns are forbidden.

When are we going to learn?

Do we need the shooters to spell it out for us? Some have, including shooters at a Charleston church and at a Colorado movie theater.

In diaries and other statements, they have explicitly stated their intentions to avoid places where people have guns. In 2016, a young Islamic State sympathizer planned a shooting at one of the largest churches in Detroit. The FBI recorded a telephone call where he explained why he had picked the church: “It’s easy, and a lot of people go there. Plus people are not allowed to carry guns in church.” . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

johnrlott

3 Comments

  1. Alexander Eban

    Here, in Israel it has been proven beyond doubt that gun free zones are an aberration: the only persons that won’t go in , leaving his gun behind is the law abiding citizen. The only thing a gun free zone degenerates to is a “soft target”!In 1963 we had a massacre at a school in Ma’alot, in Norther Israel with about 35 dead children or so. teacher were encouraged to carry and since then shootings and attacks on schools dropped to ZERO!!!!
    Furthermore , statistics show that police, army and other security forces account for only 15% of stopped attacks: 85% !!!! are stopped by armed citizens that happened to be there. Fact!!
    2 things are important:
    a) Background checks are all important.
    b) The reason for buying a gun is irrelevant. reasons can and will change with time.
    c) Only freaks carry revolvers. practically all serious minded people carry a semiautomatic handgun. so banning semis is something nobody will put up to. seriously what are you going to do. Jail 350 million Americans who won’t turn their guns in?
    In the Famed Australia- after the last legislation went into effect- there was a drop in firearms numbers, but then people started buying smuggled guns. now they have 3 times the previous number of guns, but now most of them aren’t registered and nobody knows in whose hands.
    good luch with that!!!

  2. Alexander Eban

    Here, in Israel it has been proven beyond doubt that gun free zones are an aberration: the only persons that won’t go in , leaving his gun behind is the law abiding citizen. The only thing a gun free zone degenerates to is a “soft target”! In 1963 we had a massacre at a school in Ma’alot, in Norther Israel with about 35 dead children or so. teachers were encouraged to carry and since then, shootings and attacks on schools dropped to ZERO!!!!
    Furthermore , statistics show that police, army and other security forces account for only 15% of stopped attacks: 85% !!!! are stopped by armed citizens that happened to be on the scene. Fact!!
    3 things are important:
    a) Background checks are all important.
    b) The reason for buying a gun is irrelevant. reasons can and will change with time.
    c) Only freaks carry revolvers. practically all serious minded people carry a semiautomatic handgun. so banning semis is something nobody will put up with. Seriously, what are you going to do? Jail 350 million Americans who won’t turn their guns in?
    In the Famed Australia- after the last legislation went into effect- there was a drop in firearms numbers, but then people started buying smuggled guns. now they have 3 times the previous number of guns, but now most of them aren’t registered and nobody knows in whose hands.
    good luch with that!!!

  3. Michael Fallon

    So throwing rocks from a bucket and swatting at incoming bullets with miniature bats, will be effective against an armed homicidal maniac? These people work in education, and this, is their solution? No wonder our schools are in trouble, with such idiotic thinking.

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