2/00 Guns In School

Guns In School
by
Larry Pratt

The occasional school shootings that have been magnified in the media to proportions of epic disaster can be greatly curtailed. But not by more gun control laws.

The solution is quite simple. Enable adults to carry concealed firearms in schools. Such an easy thing to do, of course, meets with howls of disbelief from those advocating civilian disarmament.

Their disbelief is actually one of the best evidences that the aim of gun control is to disarm everybody but the government.

Gun control advocates claim that a gun in the hands of a teacher, principal, janitor or some other adult at a school is more dangerous than an armed killer with the only firearm at the scene of the crime.

Disarmament activists want to live in this fantasy world no matter how much their views do not match the real world.

Gun controllers are convinced that all they need to do is pass more restrictions on gun ownership and the bad guys will get the message and stop committing crimes.

Also part of their fantasy world is an upside down view of who you can trust. Gun controllers are willing to trust bad guys to obey the law, but insist on viewing the whole population with grave suspicion. You and I are viewed as too crime-prone, and certainly too irresponsible, to be trusted with a firearm, much less a concealed firearm at a school.

My recent trip to Israel yielded proof that guns save lives and that disarmament kills.

In 1974 there was a dreadful attack on a group of school kids, killing over 30. After a national debate, the country’s parliament, the Knesset, decided that bad guys would not obey additional Israeli gun control laws.

So Israel set about arming principals, teachers, and in some of the conflict zones, parents to protect students at school.

When I was in Israel it was very common to see young men in their 20’s protecting groups of school kids sight-seeing in Jerusalem or elsewhere in the country.

The only time school kids have been killed since 1974 was when a group of students were touring a peace shrine on the Jordanian border, and were told to leave their guns before entering. A Jordanian soldier was able to kill some of the defenseless students.

Guns really do save lives — but not if we insist on laws that ensure that only the bad guys will have them.