COMMENTARY:
It's time for new thinking about guns in schools
By Andrew Rothman
In the last two weeks, we've seen a rash of deadly school shootings. In
Bailey, Colo., an armed man burst into a school, held six girls hostage,
molesting some of them before killing one of the girls and then himself. In
rural central Wisconsin, a 15-year-old boy shot and killed his school
principal.
And in Lancaster, Pa., Charles Carl Roberts IV took 10 Amish girls hostage
at a school, then shot them, execution-style. At this writing, five girls
have died, one has been removed from life support and brought home to die,
and four are still hospitalized.
Roberts wasn't Amish, police say, and held no particular grudge against
them. According to Pennsylvania's State Police commissioner, he just picked
the school because it was close, and had little or no security.
In all of these murders, the perpetrators chose to attack where they knew
there would be no effective resistance to their violence.
Unfortunately, that is the situation in almost all of our schools.
FBI statistics have proven that the single most effective means of
preventing violent harm is to resist with a firearm. And yet our lawmakers
and school officials have effectively assured that these deadly attacks will
continue to occur in our children's schools.
It doesn't have to be this way. In Israel, after PLO terrorists targeted
school children in 1974, the government started letting reservists keep
their guns at home and carry them on the streets.
Teachers and school nurses started to carry guns, armed parent (and
grandparent) volunteers patrolled the schools, and no field trips were
taken without armed guards.
As a result, the terrorists gave up on schools as targets. Well, one
particularly stubborn terrorist attempted a suicide attack in 2002, but an
Israeli teacher shot him before he harmed anyone.
In March 2005, when Jeff Weise killed his police officer grandfather, stole
his police guns and drove to Red Lake High School, he had nine minutes
before police arrived, time enough to kill an unarmed security guard, a
teacher and five students and to shoot and seriously injure seven more.
An armed guard, an armed principal or an armed janitor could have
stopped him within those nine minutes and cut short his deadly rampage.
Some will undoubtedly argue that more guns can only lead to more violence.
But to do so is to fall prey to the worst sort of moral relativism.
Offensive violence and defensive force are not the same; force, even lethal
force, in the protection of innocent lives, is a moral right embraced by
Mahatma Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, and every
legal system in our history from Minnesota Statutes to the 4,000-year-old
Code of Hammurabi.
Under Minnesota law, schools and day cares may allow faculty, staff, parents
or visitors with carry permits to carry a defensive firearm in the school.
All it takes is a letter of permission from the principal, superintendent or
day care director.
As a firearm instructor, I'm willing to do my part. I, or one on my fellow
certified instructors, will provide carry permit training, at no charge, for
any public school employee with such permission.
Minnesota school officials, we need those permissions to be given -
Minnesota's children are worth protecting.
Andrew Rothman, of Chanhassen, is a certified firearm instructor, executive
director of the Minnesota Association of Defensive Firearm Instructors
(
www.madfi.org) and the father of two children who will soon be of school
age.
