Fallacies Put Our Children at Risk While Facts Show What Works

Maryland police arrested a would be mass-murderer before he attacked a school. The aspiring killer has taught us a lot. He was relatively ordinary as mass murderers go, but what was unusual was that the police in Rockville, Maryland released excerpts from the wanna-be murderer’s manifesto.

We’ve read similar stories from other mass murderers, but now we have their statements easily accessible for the public to see. If you read them carefully, these statements also show us the problems we need to face in protecting our children at school and in public.

Mass-murderers appear to go through consistent stages. They first justify their actions. In this case, the murderer complained that his teachers were “evil” and classmates were “assholes,” even going as far back as elementary school. Mass-murderers routinely study other attacks and the news media’s reaction to them.

The Maryland murderer wanted to rack up a record number of victims in order to get the publicity he desperately craved. Mass-murderers expect to be killed during their attack or to take their own life immediately afterwards. In Maryland, the murderer worried about spending his life in prison if he survived.

Aspiring killers plan their attacks for months or even years. They form detailed plans about which schools and which classrooms are easiest to target. They plan detailed routes to the school as well as the tools they will use. The Maryland wanna-be murderer considered using both firearms and bombs.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a new trend among the killers with young men and women who feel alienated from their own bodies. They try to live as the other sex in order to reduce their anxiety. Some of them then lash out at society over their confusion. That appears to be the case with the murderers who attacked schools in Isla Vista, California, in Uvalde, Texas, and in Nashville, Tennessee. That was also the case with the Rockville, Maryland would be killer. He was born a female and now describes himself as male.

That leaves us with a lot of problems to face. We’ve prevented our children from failing and from learning hard lessons. Social media now relentlessly compares children to their classmates. We forget that adolescence is hard. The attention-seeking news media consistently turns notoriety-seeking murderers into worldwide celebrities. Unfortunately, we as a society have additional problems to face if we want to protect our children in school.

We know how to protect our children and we’ve known hot to do it for decades. These “celebrity-murderers” have told us how. The wanna-be murderer in Rockville told us again, as did the murderer who attacked a school in Nashville.

Like those who commit suicide, these celebrity-murderers aren’t afraid to die, but they are deeply afraid of failure. That tells us a lot. We don’t need a perfect defense to protect our children, but any credible defense at a school or church plants a forest of doubt in the mind of the attacker. Those doubts have formed a perfect deterrent so far. No one has attacked a school with armed teachers.

The good news is that school shootings are extremely rare. They’re also horrific enough that we can’t ignore them.

Over 30 states now allow school staff to be armed on campus. Thousands of school boards have gone through the process of qualifying and trained volunteer school employees to defend their students. We have millions of classroom-days of experience with armed staff at school. None of these trained school defenders have accidentally shot anyone someone. And the news gets even better.

The best defense prevents attacks in the first place. Mass-murderers don’t want to get into gunfights with bullets going both ways. They consistently target “gun-free” schools rather than face an armed defender. We’ve never had an attack on a school campus that had a publicly announced program of armed school staff. Unfortunately, that solution frightens politicians even as it saves students’ lives.

Politicians live in a world where perceptions trump reality. The politician can’t afford a bad headline that says he put children at risk. A headline that says he proposed “More Guns in Schools” could kill his career. The headlines do the damage even if the story describes the perfect safety record armed teachers have amassed a dozen paragraphs later.

I have to notice how differently the media treats the same politician after they’ve defunded police and then asked for a larger personal security detail. We don’t see the headline claiming that “More Guns in City Hall” are bad. Why are armed defenders a good thing for politician but bad for our children?

Politicians fear provocative solutions to school safety. So are the agenda-driven news media. Politicians tend to only consider solutions that the media already accept. That leaves the real solutions up to us. We have to lead the politicians and the journalists. It’s up to us to study the issues and be better-informed than our politicians. That isn’t difficult. And we need to be louder than the media when we tell our elected officials what to do.