As I wrote yesterday, schools are known to law enforcement as being attractive targets for criminally insane people bent on killing. That fact makes it hard to understand why so few schools have armed guards to protect the children and staff.
One factor that killers consider when choosing their targets is the amount of armed opposition they might encounter. Even the criminally insane are smart enough to choose a location where nobody else will have guns, where guns are banned. It should be pointed out that if Adam Lanza had a gone into the school without a gun but swinging a machete, he still would have killed a lot of people.
"Policies making areas 'gun-free' provide a sense of safety to those who engage in magical thinking," wrote Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today on Dec. 14, "but in practice, of course, killers aren't stopped by gun-free zones. As always, it's the honest people — the very ones you want to be armed — who tend to obey the law."The loudest voices now renewing the cry for more gun laws are politicians, mostly Democrats. They argue that schools should be gun-free zones, and that allowing school staff to be armed would be dangerous. But which is more dangerous: Having yet another school left vulnerable to yet another armed crazy person's homicidal whims, where he can walk about shooting people at ease for many minutes until the police arrive? The moment the killer enters the building, it is in fact no longer "gun-free."
So, a bad guy is walking the halls of the school: Someone calls 911, but how they must wait for police to arrive - with guns. Guns, not anti-gun laws, will save them from the bad guy. Police do what armed staff could have done minutes before, and needless deaths sooner, and that's shoot the attacker. But people died in the time it took police to arrive and get a bead on the bad guy.
