To Protect Children in Schools, We Have to Be Willing to Look at the Data

We’ve all seen pictures of gang members openly gathered on city the streets. We’ve seen armed gangs take over apartment buildings at gunpoint. Police have looked the other way until video broke on social media. Society has ignored violence for too long, but that is starting to change.

NEW VIDEO armed group at troubled #aurora #colorado apartment complex now home to many migrants. Councilmember @DaniJurinsky says gangs have taken over the complex @KDVR @AuroraPD pic.twitter.com/J1uie8Y2M6

— Vicente Arenas (@vicentearenastv) August 28, 2024

California politicians admit openly that they discriminate against honest gun owners. Citizens can’t be charged money when they register to vote. Voting is a right, not a privilege. That’s why poll taxes are illegal.

Those rules, however, don’t apply to other constitutional rights. California politicians charge thousands of dollars and take up days of our time so that law-abiding citizens can get a government permission slip. That permission slip allows the honest gun owner to carry their firearm down to their mailbox or to a grocery store.

Let’s note also that criminals don’t bother with requirements for those government permission slips and the background checks.

Nationwide, about 16 million adults carry a gun even though far more of us have carry permits, those government permission slips. That’s according to surveys. With 29 states no longer requiring carry permits, the actual number is probably much higher.

The number of people with carry permits varies drastically depending on the part of the country you look at. About half of the adults in some up-state Pennsylvania counties have carry permits while some counties in California didn’t issue permits at all. That’s likely changed thanks to recent court rulings such as Bruen. And, of course, then there are otherwise law-abiding people who carry whatever the law may be, with our without a permit.

That matters in places like California because there are about 700,000 violent crimes there each year. About 28,0000 of those violent crimes are sexual assaults.

California Democrats claim that we’re far safer when the victims of violent crimes are disarmed. Politicians make that claim even though, despite about 1.6 million defensive gun uses every year, we seldom have to actually shoot our attacker and we almost never shoot an innocent bystander.

Criminals can and do shoot innocent victims, but our legally armed neighbors generally don’t. Like us, they feel the moral weight of owning and using a gun.

Do honest citizens ever make mistakes? Of course we do. Is it common? Not at tall. Would we save tens of thousands of lives if more of us were armed? Of course we would, but we have to both trust ourselves and our  neighbors and be willing to look at the violence in our communities for that to happen. Let me explain what that means.

Many states allow armed school staff to protect their students. California, however, has made it illegal for school staff to defend students with guns. Instead, teachers and administrators are supposed to call the police if a killer attacks their campus. The politicians claim that bad things will happen if school staff are allowed to be armed.

That may sound plausible…if you haven’t studied violence and the statistics around it. It isn’t commonly known, but we’ve already conducted the experiment of what happens when we arm school teachers and staff. We’ve trained thousand upon thousands of them to be first responders. They’ve carried firearms in schools for more than three million school days. In all that time, there hasn’t been a murder or serious injury that resulted from armed staff members.

Some worry because there could be a problem with armed staff members in schools. Remember that California leads the nation in mass shootings. We have to pick our problems. It’s foolish to put our children at risk for a very real problem in order to protect them from a theoretical problem that hasn’t happened.

Our students are much like our politicians. They’re much safer if they have armed defenders. The facts are out there. We just have to be willing to see them.

Most of us want to close our eyes and pretend that violence won’t affect us and our children. That might change as more and more of us can now be legally armed every day in public. Practice speaks louder than words and tends to change your mindset. And it’s much louder than even a California politician.

 

This article originally appeared at the Slow Facts blog and is reprinted here with permission.