Arm Teachers and Ban Gun-free Zones

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

There are three truths that are emerging from the tragedy in Connecticut.

The first is that gun-free zones do not work. Glenn Harlan Reynold in his column,”Gun-free zones provide false sense of security” notes, “”After a shooting spree,” author William Burroughs once said, “they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.”

According to Reynold, “There are a lot of problems with this approach, but one of the most significant is this one: It doesn’t work. One of the interesting characteristics of mass shootings is that they generally occur in places where firearms are banned: malls, schools, etc. That was the finding of a famous 1999 study by John Lott of the University of Maryland and William Landes of the University of Chicago, and it appears to have been borne out by experience since then as well.”

The second is that school administrators and teachers must be armed. David A. Patten in an exclusive  interview with Professor Lott, one of the nation’s leading gun experts asked, “Could arming teachers and getting rid of gun-free zones have averted a tragedy such as we saw in Connecticut? Professor Lott responded:

The amount of time that elapses between when the attack starts and when someone can get to the scene with a gun is very important in determining what the carnage is going to be. The faster you can get somebody [there], the more you can limit it. If you could get the police there in 8 minutes, which would be record time, that would be an eon for people who are there helplessly having to face the killer by themselves with no protection.”

The third truth is doing more of the same things inextricably leads to more deaths. Time for a paradigm shift.

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