Time may bring healing, but the 28 days since Newtown, Connecticut’s tragedy have not ushered clarity into the fantasy too many American gun enthusiasts operate under.
The belief that life is the relentless assault of the deranged and evil upon the good infects every attempt to evaluate gun laws in America. The face of this delusion is Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President and CEO of the National Rifle Association. A week after the assault on Sandy Hook, LaPierre gave his remedy for school shootings: armed guards in all public schools. Ohio, Utah and Texas echoed LaPierre’s theory that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” by offering programs encouraging teachers to obtain concealed carry permits.
Never mind that LaPierre and other conservatives just completed, and lost, a presidential campaign denouncing government size — but if anything constitutes aggressive state growth, an exponential increase in armed government employees is it.
Ignore the regulatory maze teachers with concealed carry permits must navigate to bring a gun into school without immediate termination of employment.
Texas requires superintendents to grant permission for each teacher who desires to carry a gun. Ohio delegates the task to each district. Most schools allow no one without a police badge to touch firearms on campus.
The hypothesis of LaPierre, Ohio, Utah and Texas miscalculates both the cause and frequency of school shootings. The Secret Service’s Safe School Initiative puts the odds of death by gunshot in an American public school at 1 in 1,600,000. In other words, not you, not your child, not your friends, not your friends’ children or anyone you’re likely to cross in your lifetime. America’s problem is not firearms discharging in schools, but in houses and street corners.
Similarly, these infrequent catastrophes are not perpetrated by the psychotic or psychopathic. The only form of mental illness the Secret Service found prevalent in assailants was severe depression, often coupled with suicidal thoughts.
After misfiring this much, it’s only fair to ask LaPierre how often his “good guys with guns” stop school shooters.
The answer: almost never. When the Secret Service published the Safe Schools Initiative, only 8 percent of all attacks were stopped by police discharging their weapons. Our schools don’t lack police presence, but the availability of psychologists, social workers and counselors.
If we accept the National Institute of Health’s classification of psychosis as “a loss of contact with reality,” a corollary question follows. Does the NRA-inspired fantasy, both relentless and thorough, warrant a diagnosis? If there is a Wayne LaPierre in your life, believing armed school guards and armed teachers will cure the affliction of American school shootings, ignore the fantasy and encourage them to seek immediate psychiatric care.
Brian Marceau can be reached at arg-opinion @uidaho.edu