Why School Marshals Won't Work

Those Americans who favor limits - if not an outright ban - on military-style assault weapons in civilian hands, now constitute a majority of the population.

Sadly, however, we are not a well-organized majority.  We don't contribute much money, time, or energy to making our country safer.  Thus, a few million zealous defenders of "Second Amendment rights" - backed by the corporate wealth of gun and ammunition manufacturers and large retail chains - continue to make public policy which is detrimental to the general welfare.

Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings - and President Obama's courageously forthright response thereto - there is hope that the majority of Americans will finally get involved in the debate over weapons laws.  But to enter that debate, it  will be necessary most of us to prepare for the stock arguments of gun-rights advocates.

Please note:  I don't advocate actually debating, face-to-face, with passionate advocates of gun rights.  You're not going to change any minds that way.  This is the tactic the Right has used for the past thirty years to exhaust those with whom they disagree. 

Make outrageous claims.  Cite unsubstantiated "facts".  Use contorted logic.  Frustrate your opponent by forcing him or her to play a game of rhetorical "Whack-a-Mole" until exhaustion sets in. 

That's a great strategy for keeping your opponents from doing the real work, which is persuading - not the people on the other side - but the people in the middle.  The undecided folks.  

The folks who count.   

Of course, among the folks who count, you're still going to have to have decent arguments for your side, and some familiarity with the more plausible arguments of the opposition.  But it's one thing to refute someone who isn't listening, and another to talk sense with someone who has an open mind.

I don't propose, in this space, to meet every one of the arguments set forth by the gun lobby.  I lack the expertise, and - besides - the various organizations promoting rational weapons laws have useful websites which my readers can consult.

However, I would like to tackle one superficially plausible argument about which I know a little something.

Having spent a dozen years of my life as a public school teacher, and one as an assistant principal, I feel pretty safe in saying that the idea of placing armed guards in public schools is no solution to making those schools safe.

I write a weekly column for my hometown newspaper, the Chester Village News, and - after my first column on Sandy Hook - a reader raised the question of whether armed guards might not solve the problem of heavily-armed intruders in our schools.  He used the example of the Federal sky-marshal program to argue his point.

Without presuming that this particular gentleman is open to a rational counter-argument, I'd like to propose an answer.

First, let's look at some numbers.  There are around 99,000 public schools (K-12) in this country.  Assuming they deserve equal protection, there are another 33,700 private schools serving the K-12 population.

When you compare this total with the approximately 30,000 passenger airline flights per day in this country, you can see that it's bigger job.  About four times bigger.

And that's assuming that the sky-marshal program actually involved putting an armed marshal on every plane.  Unless I'm mistaken, it did not.

Federal sky-marshals worked anonymously, and they were only needed on some planes.  The idea was to deter terrorists or hijackers by posing the possibility that there would be a sky-marshal on the plane - not to be present to stop every possible hostile action. 

And, because they blended in with the other passengers, it was never possible to be certain whether there was a sky-marshal on board or not.

Guarding schools would not work that way.  The adults working at any given school are easy enough to monitor.  Faculty and staff usually enter within an hour before the beginning of the day and - unlike the passengers boarding an airplane - they are the same people every day. 

A determined killer - and most of these mass killers are determined - could ascertain - from a place of concealment - whether any unfamiliar adults had entered the building at the beginning of the day. 

And that's assuming that a school marshal would not arrive in uniform.  I suspect authorities would consider that a uniformed officer would constitute a much greater deterrent.  So let's assume the school marshal is present, alert, and armed.

Is the school safe now?

Hardly.

Consider the way schools are built.  And airliner is a single, flying tube, where you can see nearly everything from any seat.  Schools generally sprawl.  And they don't have just one entrance - they have many doors, and they're often in use.

Take, for example, the cafeteria delivery bay - a point of serious vulnerability.  Or the doors where kids go in and out to PE on nice days.  You wouldn't need just one armed guard to secure a school building from a clever intruder. 

You'd need a platoon.

Because if your intruder doesn't come in by the front door, there's nothing to keep him from coming up behind your lone school marshal and making him Victim Number One.

But even with several armed guards on each campus, there's still a problem.

Our schools are not armed camps.  Kids go out to play at recess and during PE.  On high school campuses, kids go outside on nice days - to walk to classes or to eat lunch.  On a nice day, a sniper could wreak havoc without ever approaching the building.

Or are we, instead, going to lock our schools down like fortresses - not allowing kids to go outside on nice days, not allowing outdoor PE classes, etc.

Talk about killing the learning environment.

And even if we did that, couldn't a killer turn sniper and take out a group of kids (and a few parents) waiting for the school bus?  Or hijack a school bus and kill to his dark heart's content?

Are we going to provide perimeter guards for all the campuses, and armed guards at all the bus stops, and aboard all the buses?

The cost would be incredible.  And it would be worth it, if that were the only way to safeguard our children.

But there's a much less costly way to achieve the same result.  A way which doesn't turn our schools into fortresses, or require the hiring or redeployment of several hundred thousand cops.

Ban the further manufacture and sale of assault-type weapons and large ammunition clips, except for military use.

For those who already own such weapons, make the owners individually and personally responsible for keeping their weapons securely locked up - and financially responsible for any harm that comes about as a result of their failure to do so.

And, since a lot of folks won't want to take that risk - or buy a new insurance policy - offer to buy up all the assault weapons anyone chooses to surrender.

Because this much seems fairly clear.  In countries that have banned assault weapons, mass murders have gone way down.  In Australia, they dropped to zero.

The dark-heart who murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary wanted to go out with a bang - and take a lot of innocents with him.  Small-time slaughter won't satisfy one of these guys.   It won't make headlines.

We need to take away their weapons.