Rep. Jim Runestad has written today in defense of his recent proposal to equip school teachers with firearms. He offers this legislation up as a solution to school shootings, promising that quicker access to guns will make our children’s schools safer. He sums up his rationale in this adage “When seconds count, police are minutes away.”
When it comes to the public health crisis we are facing of overwhelming gun violence, a better adage comes to mind: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
The threat of gun violence is very real, something we as a nation are all trying desperately to protect ourselves from. This conversation about arming teachers, however, is not a real solution.
Looking at gun violence as I would any other public health crisis, I’m trained to review the evidence, identify the root cause, and look to experts and those modeling best practices for actionable solutions to prevent further morbidity and mortality.
Not surprisingly, the root cause to our current epidemic of gun deaths is not due to any of the widely circulated talking points:
It’s not the vague threat of people with “mental illness.”
It’s not that the “good guys” have too few guns.
It’s not that our schools, teachers and kindergartners have become too “soft.”
The root cause of this problem is violent individuals, their fast, easy access to deadly weapons, and communities that are powerless to separate them from their amassed arsenal, even when those individuals are known to be a dangerous threat.
Nothing in Mr. Runestad’s proposal addresses this root cause.
When a disturbed young man walks into a school, movie theater, shopping mall, church or anywhere with a semi-automatic weapon ready to kill, it’s too late. Giving lay people access to a gun on school grounds, no matter how many hours of training at hitting a target, is not what is going to make any of us safer. Armed civilians not used to facing war zone like conditions regularly enough to know exactly what to do in those few seconds Rep. Runestad has mentioned, will do very little to help. At best, it would potentially, maybe, if everything went as planned, and all the stars aligned, would keep the body count a little lower. Maybe.
However, this still assumes some children, teachers, school officials will still die, just maybe not as many. And this only talks about schools as a potential location for a mass shooting. This is unacceptable. This is also a theory that has been disproved, with the recent shooting in Parkland, FL as a perfect case study that shows even where there are armed personnel on site, they do not deter or stop mass shootings from taking place. This is not the cure it is proposed to be.
What we do know can stop these massacres is preventing a violent person from getting access to highly deadly weapons, and/or restraining them from using the arsenal they’ve already built. When a mass shooting is being investigated, it comes to light that the shooter was known, to family, friends, communities, law enforcement, as being a risk. We find long histories of police being called to the home for domestic violence episodes, convictions for violent acts, many times perpetrated against women. We have also seen that community members who see threatening or suspicious behaviors in these individuals, both in person and online, and have reported it to authorities, there is no legal recourse to stop these individuals from obtaining, really quickly, very lethal machines, and no means to restrain them from using the ones they already have. If we continue to look at the Parkland shooting as a case study in mass school shootings, we have a perfect example of an individual known to be a threat, and a community powerless to do anything to restrain him from committing mass murder.
If we are to accept that Rep. Runestad is sincere in his desire to make schools a safer place, there are real solutions available to him. Since last summer, bills introducing universal background checks and raising the minimum age to 21 for all gun purchases, as well as red flag laws, have all sat on Rep. Runestad’s desk collecting dust. Rep. Runestad, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, is unwilling to give these bills a hearing or a vote. These are commonsense, publicly supported, gun protection proposals that would address the root cause of gun deaths and prevent the next impending mass shooting in Michigan.
The only outcome the Runestad bill will actually achieve is to sell more guns in Michigan. And we need to wonder, is that really the intention of the bill after all. I truly hope not. I urge Rep. Runestad to please listen to the voice of the police, teachers, and parents in Michigan, and drop the pursuit of adding guns into schools. The only group that seems to be in favor of spending public school money to place firearms in schools is the gun manufacturers. Instead, please bring the bills proposed by Rep. Wittenberg to a hearing, and a vote.
We’re all watching, and waiting.
