We begin today’s editorial with The New York Times editorial board and its piece rebutting the idea that armed teachers will make our school safer:
Let’s ask someone who’s in the trenches every day what he thinks of arming teachers. “It’s hard to begin to count the number of ways this is a bad idea,” said Chris Magnus, police chief of Tucson.
For starters, the number of gunslinging educators would be huge. In the United States, there are about 3.5 million elementary and secondary school teachers in public and private institutions. Arming 20 percent of them, as Mr. Trump suggested, would mean 700,000 or so teachers with Glocks and the like on their hips — an armed force half as large as America’s real armed forces on active duty. One can envision parents with the means to do so swiftly yanking their children out of that sort of environment.
More to the point, many deranged mass murderers expect to die themselves during their killing sprees. It’s almost laughable to believe that the president’s proposal would deter them.
Former Obama administration official Brandon Friedman, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, explains why arming teachers won’t work:
Arming educators is a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons, but I want to hone in on a crucial one: the fiction that arming teachers means they’ll be able to stop an armed attacker.
There were armed guards at Columbine, the Pulse nightclub and in Las Vegas at the time of the massacre. At Parkland too. Time and again, armed civilians or security guards are out-maneuvered, out-gunned and too inexperienced. It’s difficult for a rational person to reach a state where they can go toe-to-toe with an armed psychopath who has nothing to lose. I was professionally trained and still almost blew it at the moment of truth.
If armed security guards often don’t stop shootings, teachers have no chance.
Vann Newkirk at The Atlantic calls the idea “absurd”:
There are now plenty school districts across America with armed school police officers, complete with metal detectors, body armor, and K-9 units. Even the patently outlandish suggestion of Newsmax host Wayne Root to provide schools with armed drones isn’t so far from reality. Schools already have drones, though not (yet) armed. [...] The “good guy with a gun” theory underpinning the movement has never had any real credibility beyond a few choice anecdotes, and the training required to make armed teachers anything more than a liability would be onerous. Teachers already work long hours for relatively little pay, and many school districts have dismissed the idea as simply impractical.
At The Chicago Tribune, Eric Zorn explains how the NRA’s power comes not from direct contributions to candidates but from keeping its members scared and motivated to go to the polls:
Gun rights supporters feel this way pretty much all the time.
That’s why they tend to win. That’s why measures supported by suffocating majorities of Americans die in legislative bodies and why our lawmakers seem to blithely ignore safety statistics from other, less gun-crazed countries.
You don’t close this enthusiasm gap with one week of demonstrations and speeches. You don’t close it by shaming politicians into refusing to take NRA money.
You close the enthusiasm gap the same way the NRA created it, with sustained focus and by harnessing a critical mass of voters. You close the enthusiasm gap not simply by being loud, but by remaining loud in the determination to punish elected officials who, say, refuse to close the gun-show loophole, to ban bump stocks, to expand and tighten background checks or to limit the availability of weapons of war.
Eli Stokols at The New Yorker details how post-Columbine, Colorado battled the NRA:
In the broader national narrative of N.R.A. invincibility, Colorado is an exception. Leveraging a statewide network of progressive donors and activists built over the preceding decade and funded by Michael Bloomberg and other national gun-control advocates, Democrats passed the gun-control measures when they controlled Colorado’s governorship and the state legislature. But they did not anticipate the backlash that allowed Republicans to win control of the state Senate by ousting two Democratic state senators in recall votes and winning a third seat after a Democrat resigned. /react-text
Paul Walman also takes on the myth that the NRA is invincible:
Isn't the NRA pretty popular? The answer is that it's complicated, and it depends on what districts and states we're talking about. Nationally, the NRA has in the past had approval ratings in the 40s or 50s. But they've relied on an aggressive effort to cultivate grassroots activism and convince legislators that their members are unusually motivated by the gun issue alone. The idea is that while there may be more Americans who oppose the NRA's positions than support them, theirs is a particularly active minority that will mobilize on the gun issue.
At some times and in some places, that's true. But it's also true that the NRA's ability to swing elections in its favor is largely a myth, one the organization works hard to cultivate and maintain. When Republicans win elections the NRA takes credit, saying that the outcome was due to their money and their voters. When Democrats have a good year, on the other hand, they grow strangely quiet. For instance, in 2012 they spent $13 million trying to defeat Barack Obama, to no effect. That year they also spent over $100,000 to help eight different Senate candidates; seven of them lost.
On a final note, don’t miss Eugene Robinson’s piece on the importance of voting out NRA-supporters who block gun safety measures:
They won’t do anything meaningful about guns until you force them to with your votes.
This time, following the Parkland, Fla., massacre, does feel different from all the other times. But I fear the outcome will always be the same — thoughts, prayers, furrowed brows and no real action — until the Republicans who control Congress and so many state legislatures start losing elections because of their obstinacy on gun control.
They need to fear you and me more than they fear the National Rifle Association.