Tag Archives: school shootings

The Race Card Is Getting A Little Tattered

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Violence is our schools is a problem. There is as much debate on the reasons for it as there is on the possible solutions. One solution that has been discussed is that of using military veterans as an armed presence in our schools, thus making them hard targets rather than soft targets. As with any solution, there are pros and cons to that idea. However, David Hogg (a former student at the Parkland School in Florida who was not in the building the day of the shooting in that school) has voiced an objection to placing armed men in our schools that makes no sense to me.

On Saturday, Breitbart reported the following:

While speaking at the June 11 March for Our Lives rally, gun control proponent David Hogg suggested that putting more cops in schools may actually endanger students do not have white skin.

Hogg suggested that a common response to school shootings is to put more police in schools.

He then claimed, “Putting more cops in schools hasn’t worked.” He cited two examples to bolster his viewpoint: First he pointed to the armed officer who stood outside Parkland instead of entering, even as the attack was carried out. Then he made claims about the police response to Uvalde.

Hogg did not mention the numerous times armed resource officers have saved lives on campus.

For example, on December 13, 2013, an 18-year-old with a shotgun entered Denver-area Arapahoe High School and had to face the fact that an armed resource officer was coming for him. The Denver Post noted that the resource officer was a deputy sheriff who, hearing a gunshot, ran toward the gunman. As the resource officer closed in, the attacker took his own life, ending the attack.

The Arapahoe attack lasted 80 seconds. The Sandy Hook Elementary attack, where there was no armed resource officer, lasted over nine minutes. 

If there is someone in a school shooting children, I don’t think anyone cares what color that person is–he just needs to be stopped. There will never be a perfect solution to gun violence (because the problem lies in men–not guns). Until all people respect life and do not resort to violence, violence will be part of our society. Cain killed Abel with a rock. The problem was not the rock.

Getting The Numbers Right

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On Wednesday, NPR reported that there have been 27 school shootings this year. Reason posted an article on Thursday explaining why that number is misleading and inaccurate.

The article at Reason reports:

The problem here is that three very differently defined terms are being used somewhat incautiously and interchangeably: school shooting, mass shooting, and mass school shooting. Uvalde was a mass school shooting; the 26 previous tragedies at schools this year were not.

…The difference is significant. Education Week, which tracks all school shootings, defines them as incidents in which a person other than the suspect suffers a bullet wound on school property. Many of the 26 previous shootings involved disputes between students in parking lots, or after athletic events, and all of them resulted in one or zero deaths. These deaths are still incredibly tragic, of course. But they are fundamentally unlike what happened in Uvalde.

Uvalde is a mass school shooting. This is defined in different ways too: an incident in which at least four people (some counters make it three) are shot and/or killed. The Gun Violence Archive counts incidents in which at least four people were shot. Under this definition, many incidents of street crime and domestic violence count as mass shootings, even if no deaths result. A stricter tally of mass school shootings, conducted by criminologists for Scientific American, only includes incidents where the shootings resulted in at least four deaths. Using their criteria, the number of mass school shootings in the U.S. since the year 1966 is 13. These crimes claimed the lives of 146 people in total.

Obviously, 13 incidents in the last 56 years is a very different statistic than 27 incidents in the last few months. The two figures are so far apart because they measure separate things. One-off gun incidents are a serious problem in the U.S., and those taking place at schools are no exception. Mass casualty events, on the other hand, constitute less than 1 percent of all gun deaths. Suicides and non–mass-casualty murders—usually carried out with handguns rather than assault rifles—constitute the overwhelming majority of gun crimes.

I can’t  help but wonder if NPR is purposely misleading Americans. What happened in Uvalde is horrific, but it is sad that many political operatives are using the events there to further an agenda that will take away the rights of innocent Americans.

The Real Statistics On School Shootings

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What happened in Texas this week is horrific. There were a number of mistakes made that allowed the incident to occur, but that will be sorted out later. It was a horrible event, and everyone’s heart goes out to the parents, grandparents and other family members impacted by the incident. The immediate calls for gun control are simply political grandstanding. Until we deal with mental illness among teenagers, we will not have a solution to gun violence.

On Wednesday, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article that provides some historical context to what happened this week.

The article posted a list of school shootings where four or more people are killed since 2000. Here is the list:

2022: 1
2021: 1
2020: 0
2019: 0
2018: 2
2017: 1
2016: 0
2015: 1
2014: 1
2013: 1
2012: 2
2011: 0
2010: 0
2009: 0
2008: 1
2007: 1
2006: 1
2005: 1
2004: 0
2003: 0
2002: 0
2001: 0
2000: 0

A school shooting is a serious thing, but it doesn’t look as if it is a common occurrence.

The article continues:

So mass school shootings are rare, a total of 14 incidents in more than 22 years. In a nation of 320 million, many more people die from bee stings, lighting strikes, and so on; yet, for understandable reasons, school shootings command national attention. But their very rarity makes it hard to know what to do about them, especially since most school shooters expect to die, which makes them more or less impossible to deter. How do you prevent something that happens, in crude terms, once every 480 million man-years?

The “solutions” proposed by Democrats are laughable, obviously intended for political gain rather than practical benefit. Banning “assault rifles,” while likely unconstitutional, would do zero good. In close quarters, handguns are better than rifles, even short-barreled rifles like AR-15s. In the worst school shooting rampage so far, at Virginia Tech, the murderer used handguns. And when the ill-fated ban on “assault weapons” expired in 2004, the homicide rate went down, not up.

But there are things we can do. Would-be mass murderers may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. They nearly always strike in gun-free zones, including schools, because they want to be sure they are the only one with a firearm. Gun-free zones are an idiotic concept and should be abolished. And if every public school in America fired a diversity consultant and hired an armed guard, they would be vastly safer. Who stands in the way of such practical reform? Mostly the teachers’ unions, which bitterly resist improvements in school security, thus selling out, as they consistently do, the interests of American children.

After noting that the number of school shootings increased after the Covid shutdowns, the article notes:

The only plausible explanation for this increase is that covid-related shutdowns of schools and businesses exacerbated mental health issues in vulnerable young people. There is a great deal of data confirming such an effect, and in the extreme case, shutdowns evidently have have led to a dramatic increase in “active shooters.” Let’s not make that foolish mistake again.

Those solutions aren’t perfect, but they are practical and would reduce the already microscopically-low incidence of mass school shootings.

This certainly represents a more rational approach than taking guns away from law-abiding citizens.