Another School Shooting in a Place where teachers and staff were banned from carrying guns: Robb Elementary School in the Uvalde, Texas CISD

A shooting at a Texas elementary school left 14 children and one teacher murdered. While about 30% of school districts in Texas 2020 had armed teachers and staff, unfortunately, the Robb Elementary School in the Uvalde, Texas CISD doesn’t appear to be one of them. Their firearm regulations are detailed here. There are no provisions in their regulations for teachers or staff to carry.

The attack in Buffalo, New York illustrates once again how these murderers are attracted to places where the victims are not armed. For example, in his manifesto, he wrote: “areas where CCW are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack.” More examples are available here and here.

Unfortunately, as we found in our 2019 study, despite 20 states allowing teachers or staff to carry guns, all the school shootings have occurred in schools that don’t allow them to carry. From the abstract of our study.

After the Columbine school shooting 20 years ago, one of the more significant changes in how we protect students has been the advance of legislation that allows teachers to carry guns at schools. There are two obvious questions: Does letting teachers carry create dangers? Might they deter attackers? Twenty states currently allow teachers and staff to carry guns to varying degrees on school property, so we don’t need to guess how the policy would work. There has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between 6 AM and midnight at a school that lets teachers carry guns. Fears of teachers carrying guns in terms of such problems as students obtaining teachers guns have not occurred at all, and there was only one accidental discharge outside of school hours with no one was really harmed. While there have not been any problems at schools with armed teachers, the number of people killed at other schools has increased significantly – doubling between 2001 and 2008 versus 2009 and 2018.

John R. Lott, Jr., “Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns are Extremely Safe: Data on the Rate of Shootings and Accidents in Schools that allow Teachers to Carry,” Social Science Research Network, May 29, 2019.

Research on this topic that we published in the Journal of Health Behavior Research is available here. Some information on universities is available here. A related piece that Dr. Lott wrote back in 2018 is available here.