03-01-2008, 10:24 AM
Schools Should Arm Against A Sea Of Troubles
Quote:Laurence Cohen
February 29, 2008
We've all heard the nostalgic stories from Catholics who remember the good old days in Catholic school, when a nun wrapped them on the knuckles with a ruler for some sin, real or imagined.
Looked at through the lens of today, what is remarkable about those anecdotes is the underlying reality that the nuns with the rulers were the best-armed people in the school. No student bashed with a ruler was going to turn on the good sister with a sawed-off shotgun or assault rifle or knife or hammer borrowed from Martin Luther.
As a residual memory from the good old days, schools and other facilities with easy accessibility continue to take some comfort in the notion that if weaponry is discouraged, prohibited or at least frowned upon, the good guys will be the only folks wielding justice, if only with a ruler. But in this Garden of Eden, this "gun-free zone" age we pretend to live in, the bad guys, the crazy guys, the unstable guys do have (dare we say the word out loud?) guns.
We leave our most vulnerable population open for target practice. As the disturbing stories pile up as high as the dead bodies at the site of a massacre, as we become more aware that most of the mass killings of late across the nation ended not with the death of the killer by an avenging civilian angel or police officer, but by suicide, the no-guns ethos begins to look somewhat ridiculous.
Our public officials (especially in a sissy Northeastern states such as Connecticut) are not inclined to engage the public in conversation about the potential benefits of carrying a weapon -- just in case.
In truth, we in the "progressive" Northeast find the notion of being Dodge City so distasteful that most school districts prohibit "security guards" from carrying weapons. Even the nuns had rulers. For years, academic bad boy John Lott, from pulpits at Yale and various think tanks, did his career prospects no favor with research suggesting that "concealed-carry" laws that encourage the good guys to carry weapons actually reduce crime — both by the simple act of blowing away the bad guys, and more important, by giving the bad guys pause before committing crimes against folks who might have a pistol in their purse.
One doesn't have to be a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association to be just a bit taken aback by the freedom with which nuts with guns can wander across college campuses or public schools or church parking lots, killing and killing again, with no one apparently equipped to pull out a competing gun and shoot them dead. Louise Zoller received all manner of accolades and national media exposure earlier last month after the 33-year-old Florida woman confronted a crazy husband (not her own) and knocked his gun out of his hand after he killed his wife at a day-care center. Amid all the cheers for her bravery, there was nary a word about how nice it would have been if someone on the staff of the day-care center had pulled a gun from a desk drawer and shot the crazy husband in the head.
But that just wouldn't do. This month, in Bartow, Fla., a teacher at a public technical school was fired for having a handgun in his truck. In the parking lot.
It was Albert Einstein who confessed he never thought about the future, because "it comes soon enough." And so it seems to be with politicians and educators and public health types. After a public massacre, they are quick to bring in grief counselors to tend to the survivors. But any efforts to plan for an uncertain future, to ponder the risks and benefits of licensing and training staff in public facilities to carry a weapon, is too messy a piece of business.
Colleges are all atwitter these days with "lockdown" plans — again, after a slaughter has already taken place. No talk yet of how the dean of students will be armed with a really heavy textbook to throw at the intruder. And certainly, not a word about three professors, two department heads and one provost who will be authorized to pull out 9 mm handguns and do some serious damage if the situation calls for firepower.
Laurence D. Cohen is a public policy consultant who served as special assistant to former Gov. John G. Rowland. His column appears every other Friday. He can be reached at cohencolumn@aol.com.