Anyone want to tell me why this isn't a good idea?
HARROLD, Texas (AP) - In this tiny Texas town, children and their parents don't give much thought to safety at the community's lone school - mostly because some of the teachers are carrying concealed weapons.
In remote Harrold, the nearest sheriff's office is 30 minutes away, and people tend to know - and trust - one another. So the school board voted to let teachers bring guns to school.
"We don't have money for a security guard, but this is a better solution," Superintendent David Thweatt said. "A shooter could take out a guard or officer with a visible, holstered weapon, but our teachers have master's degrees, are older and have had extensive training. And their guns are hidden. We can protect our children."
Seems like simple common sense to me. And here's a study backing it up:
William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.
Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.
None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings . . .Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.
Their study controlled for age, sex, race, unemployment, retirement, poverty rates, state population, murder arrest rates, violent crime rates, and on and on.
The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.
Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.
You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in "gun-free zones" -- even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.
A lot of people are for concealed carry, when it affects them. Harry Reed in 2012: "I carried a gun with me everywhere I went." Now he wants everybody else's guns controlled. Diane Feinstein in 1998: "I carried a concealed weapon and I made the determination if somebody was going to try and take me out, I was going to take them with me.” Now she's introduced the feel-good-but-meaningfulss legislation to bring back the "assault weapons" ban.
