Should guns be allowed in schools?

Guns in School. In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech. Shootings, I’ve heard some discussion about what it will take to make our schools safe. One man suggested that we arm the students; others think that is just pure foolishness. So let’s consider the alternatives. The problem is that a student or students will decide to go on a killing spree. They arm themselves and appear at their school where the daily routine and emergency protocols are known to them. Then they randomly take the lives of others, staff and students, until law enforcement has arrived in sufficient numbers to close off any available exits. But this was not a hit and run, their own lives are the ones they take last. It would appear that they were suicidal from the start, and had no planes to try and get away. The problem may be that this person has lost all hope. It may be that they feel they are incapable of dealing with the world and all of its societal pressures. Is the kamikaze mission which ends in self-destruction a last ditch effort to be noticed or to ‘in effect’ impose their will on a world, even if only for a moment? Is this perhaps an attempt at grasping their moment in the lime-light, even if it is infamy and not fame? Regardless of the source of the disturbance, the fact is that the other students and faculty are facing down the barrel of a loose canon. A canon that has pre-meditated the death of as many people as they can access, and considers their own life forfeit from the start. There is no reasoning with this person. Pleading, begging, reasoning or counseling are a waste of time. They have a gun. You do not. For the moment they have the god-like power to choose who lives and who dies. You are their subjects. How do you respond to that? Preventative measures would have to be aimed at either figuring out what has spawned this phenomenon (addressing the differences of a modern education in contrast with how things were taught in past) or at early detection and identifying probable shooters to getting them into counseling. The outcome of such directions will invariably open up the rift between the secular and the sacred or it will expose the limitations of our current psychological practices. Neither of these are going to lead to a satisfactory result any time soon. Failing preventative methods leaves us with the situation of a student throwing lead at anything that moves. There can only be one answer to that. The sooner someone can throw lead back, the fewer lives this kamikaze is going to be able to take. Cameras will not stop someone from pulling a trigger, nor will ID badges, nor will uniforms, or metal detectors or any other form of ‘physical’ security. All these devices will do is increase the resemblance between our schools and our prisons. No student in a ‘free society’ wants or needs to be treated like they are in a prison! Plus it will have the undesirable effect of insuring our would-be shooters that no one inside can possibly shoot back. But what if that were taken away? What if they had no assurance that they were going to be able reign supreme, even if only for the ten to fifteen minuets it would take for officers to arrive? What if they had to deal with the very same fear that they are using to incite terror? What if the ‘terrorist’ had a reason to be terrified? That can only happen if students who are of age and who choose to do so, are permitted to exercise their right to self-protection, and ensure their ability to fight gun-fire with gun-fire by bearing arms sufficient to the need of self-preservation. Only then will a shooter have to fear being shot at. Their ‘subjects’ would have the same power as they do, and their god-like ability to pick and choose who lives and who dies would be stripped away from them. Making schools a safe place to live is not something anyone can do for them. Whether it is a campus or a foreign country, populating it with militia is not synonymous with providing security. You’d think that Americans would have learned this lesson by now. Security will only occur when the students or residence are enabled to defend themselves. When they are secure in the knowledge that they can deal anything life throws at them, then they will feel and be secure. No ‘system’ will ever give them that. And the reason is for this is simple. No system is fool-proof. Nor is this a perfect solution, but then this isn’t a perfect world. As long as there is the threat of yet another student going berserk, the best solution is the one that minimizes the damages.