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A visitor to an Old West town thought it would be a great practical joke to whip out a pistol during a poker game and fire a couple of blanks at the ceiling. He died of multiple gunshot wounds from several players before anyone knew it was a joke. But that was a different time. The Virginia Tech shooting is the latest in a long litany of school shootings. It was the latest but assuredly not the last. Initially in school shootings the only one armed is the perpetrator while all the students and staff can do is run and hide. They have no means of fighting back. The young man with the two pistols did not expect to have to shoot it out with his victims, in fact, he was counting on their defenselessness. And they were. We have to ask: do we citizens have a right to defend ourselves? It would seem our Constitution of the United States guarantees us the right of resistance yet national, state and local laws strip us of our means to resist armed killers. Were the thirty victims in the classrooms afforded a right to defend themselves or were they left defenseless by a society who at the critical moment of their defense did not defend them? The society the victims lived in said that they were safer since they were defenseless. They were told that they did not need to protect themselves because the law enforcement establishment was tasked with their safety. None of the victims had a means to shoot back. The police did come after the shooting stopped and the perpetrator had killed himself. They came, bagged the bodies and wrote a report. They had no chance to stop the attack. We can agree that the shooter violated the law in shooting the victims and the victims did not have any effective means to prevent the shooter from taking their lives. The most disturbing aspect of Monday’s shooting is that the Virginia Tech students are basically just as defenseless today as on the day of the shooting. There are not enough police to be in every classroom. As you read this, most if not all VT classrooms have no defense. In fact, all over America in colleges and public schools most classrooms are available to any shooter. In most states it is a crime to bring a gun on any educational campus. Only the shooter will have a gun, save for the chance that an officer happens along just in time. And, gun control advocates wish to make the difference between perpetrators and victims even more pronounced by tightening gun control laws. It is fine to forbid felons guns, as we already do, but any law that forbids citizens the ability to protect themselves from murderers violates the intent of our constitution. We should make it easier not harder for citizens to protect themselves. If citizens are to be protected then somebody must be armed and able to resist. That person needs to be able to surprise the perpetrators. Those defenders must be where they are needed at the time of need. Police responding in only ten minutes will be too late. We should expand our concealed carry laws to include all educational campuses. Professors, teachers and school personnel who volunteer and pass rigorous screening and training should conceal carry. In public schools the janitors who have an inclination and aptitude should be defenders along with teachers, counselors and principals. Again, the conceal carry defenders should be only those who are well screened and trained and who practice combat shooting regularly. It is important that a potential shooter not know who has firearms at a school. Only that there are armed people at every school. Sure there is a sign in public schools that says visitors must sign in, but what happens when they do not? Does it trigger an immediate rush of police, and, will that be soon enough? Even when schools lock classroom doors, tapping on the door opens it. We return to the core question: do we have a right to resist being killed? If some of the students in those classrooms were conceal carry armed, would they have been shot like fish in a barrel? No. The answer for safety and security of our classrooms is not take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. Then only the perpetrators will have guns. Are we going to do something about our defenselessness after this classroom shooting or do we have to have more students die before we act? The
Morning Show with Michael Swickard is on from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Monday through
Friday on KSNM-AM 570 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Michael’s email is: michael@swickard.com © 2007 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. |
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