by
John Stevenson
What was the theme of the “March for Our Lives”? School safety? Gun safety?
Gun control? Banning “automatic
rifles”? Banning “assault rifles”? Banning “weapons of war”? Depends who you ask.
Student-on-the-street interviews shown on TV revealed a remarkable
disdain for the Second Amendment and, to a slightly lesser degree, for the “outdated”
Constitution itself.
I watched a bit of the rally on the National Mall on
TV. One of the protest signs was a dead giveaway: TAKE YOUR GUNS, NOT MY LIFE. The rally (march, if you like) was really
about banning guns, not about making schools safe.
There was no nod to the concepts of hardening (limiting
access to) the schools, providing an armed presence to dissuade attacks or, in
the worst case, to engage and kill an attacker. This omission seems especially remarkable
because, only four days before the Mall rally, an armed guard at a Maryland
high school was able to confront the shooter and stop the attack.
Why were the Maryland experience---and its
lesson---completely ignored by the marchers?
Because they were there to rally against guns, not to rally for the
protection of schools. So best not to
mention the value of armed protection which had just been vividly demonstrated
in the Maryland incident.
Worse than the students’ failure to recognize the value
of armed protection, the media totally ignored it also. Why? Because
armed protection is not part of the ban-the-guns agenda. In fact it’s the antithesis of that agenda.
Not to try to cover too much ground here, but let’s just
look at some statistics. Although the
latest published data are for 2011, the FBI’s uniform crime reports provide the
number of murder victims by type of weapon used. Handguns 6,220. Knives 1,694.
“Personal weapons” (eg fists) 728.
Blunt objects (eg hammers, clubs) 496.
Shotguns 356. And rifles
323. So-called assault rifles (eg AR-15)
are a subset of rifles. (Note that these
data are for victims, not incidents; so in mass killings each victim is
counted, not just the incident.)
What is the lesson here?
I suggest the lesson is that the focus on “assault rifles” is misguided. Assault rifles are targeted because they are
particularly scary looking, because there are often multiple victims in a
single incident, and because the cable news channels provide wall-to-wall
coverage of such incidents. The coverage
often lasts for several days and includes profiles of the dead and heart
wrenching interviews with their bereaved relatives and even interviews with
“survivors” of the carnage---even those who had missed the entire event because
they had stayed home sick or had been on a field trip on the fateful day.
The FBI’s statistics would lead you to think a ban on
handguns, knives, hammers, or fists would do more to protect kids and make our
schools safer. Since no such bans are
likely (or even possible), perhaps the March for Our Lives folks should have
directed their efforts toward more practical solutions.
Such as hardening the schools (similar to an airport, a government
building, a courthouse, or a hospital) and having on-site armed and capable response
at the ready, which proved decisive in the Maryland example.
