Gun control extremists despise this kind of common-sense approach to the potential of school violence. But the time has come to challenge their head-in-the-sand philosophy. How many lives have been lost on public school and college campuses because of these insane victim disarmament measures? How many students and teachers might be alive today if only lawmakers and school officials had acted as responsibly as the Harrold administration?
Allowing armed staff and teachers will provide a last line of defense if other security measures at the school fail. No doubt the school board and Mr. Thweatt will suffer some slings and arrows, but if this decision one day saves the life of even one child, it will have been worthwhile.
Alan Gottlieb
Chairmain, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
August 15, 2008
HARROLD, TX SCHOOL OFFICIALS RIGHT ON CHANGE IN CAMPUS GUN POLICY, SAYS CCRKBA
[“If it only saves one life” and “for the children”. Nice, very nice.–Joe]
He’s spot on of course. One little problem we have is that, although you can count dead bodies, you cannot count the “lives saved”. Ever. Certainly not directly.
Say a killer comes into a gun free zone and starts killing people. Teacher, violating the “zone”, pulls a gun and shoots the killer, stopping him. However, in the process an innocent bystander is killed by a stray bullet. How many lives were saved? None? Less than none? Fifty? Two hundred? A thousand? There is absolutely no way to know. All we can say for sure is that some people are dead and the perp was stopped. Teacher probably goes to jail, then gets sued by the perp’s family.
What if the 9/11 hijackers had been shot dead by air-marshals before any of the planes had been overtaken? Would we be here today saying that three thousand American lives had been saved? Based on what evidence? It’s not possible. For one thing, no one had ever hijacked a plane and flown it into a building before– they had always wanted something else, and most of the time the passengers had been spared. I submit that if there had been air-marshals on board, and some innocent had been injured or killed in the process of saving the planes, we’d be hearing about how terrible a thing it was to have an armed guard on an airplane, and nothing else.
It takes years of statistics gathering. This sort of problem is very common. But that is assuming that all you care about is “safety”– whether or not we little sheep are being allowed to hurt ourselves.
That’s not the question. The question is; are our rights going to be protected, or are they going to be violated? I’m not concerned with the reasons or the excuses either way.
We can count our rights and liberties, and we can count exactly where they are being infringed. We can “count” the proper roll of government (protecting liberty and property, and dispensing justice). “Safety” and “security” to the extent that they are possible, flow naturally from there.