Banning Guns Will Not Make Schools Safe
Authored by James Bovard via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
School shootings have become the latest pretext for politicians to destroy the Second Amendment.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, declared in a Democratic presidential candidates’ debate,
“I was part of the first generation that saw routine school shootings. We have now produced the second school-shooting generation in this country. We dare not allow there to be a third.”
Another Democratic presidential candidate, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Cal.), invoked school shootings to justify confiscating millions of firearms across the nation:
“It’s not just the violence that they’ve caused; it’s the fear, the immeasurable fear that our children live in because they are still on our streets. I want to get rid of that fear.”
In reality, despite a tidal wave of misleading propaganda, the number of school shootings has fallen sharply over the past 30 years.
But anti-gun activists in government and the media have done their best to persuade people otherwise.
Last year, the federal Education Department reported that “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting” in the 2015-16 school year. National Public Radio investigated and found that the feds had exaggerated school shootings by twentyfold; NPR could confirm only 11 incidents. Cleveland was credited with 37 shooting incidents, when in reality it was simply a report of 37 schools that noted “possession of a knife or a firearm.” In DeKalb County, Georgia, “a toy cap gun fired on a school bus” counted as a school shooting. One school system was listed as a shooting locale for an incident involving a pair of scissors. NPR noted,
Most of the school leaders NPR reached had little idea of how shootings got recorded for their schools. For example, the [federal Civil Rights Data Collection] reports 26 shootings within the Ventura Unified School District in Southern California. “I think someone pushed the wrong button,” said Jeff Davis, an assistant superintendent there. The outgoing superintendent, Joe Richards, “has been here for almost 30 years and he doesn’t remember any shooting,” Davis added.
Even the leftist news site Vox noted, “The risk of a child getting killed by someone else at school in 2011, the last year for which there’s final data, was about 1 in 5 million.” Vox again: The rate of “serious violent victimization” among students — rape, sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated assault — was about 1 in 1,000 in 2011, down from 1 in 100 in 1995. In 1995, 10 percent of students were victims of some kind of crime at school; in 2011, just 4 percent were.” Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox observed, “We over-obsess about school shootings. Surveys show the majority of students are afraid there will be a mass shooting at their school. These are rare events — scary though they may be, tragic though they may — and we shouldn’t over-respond.”
Imitation shootings
But hard facts have proven no match for sustained hype for antigun activists.
Police and schools have responded to the new paranoia with an array of drills that have been lame-brained even by government standards.
Last January, numerous Indiana elementary school teachers were shot as part of a “safe schools” training program. According to the Indiana State Teachers Association, sheriffs’ deputies ordered teachers “into a room four at a time, told them to crouch down and then shot them execution-style with pellets in rapid succession,” leaving several of them bloodied and many of them screaming. The union complained, “The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened. Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” The union is “is lobbying lawmakers to add [legislative] language prohibiting teachers from being shot with any sort of ammunition” during school-safety drills, according to the Indianapolis News.
Schools are “increasingly turning their hallways into an imitation of a real mass shooting, complete with police officers firing BB guns and drama students enlisted to play victims, made up with fake blood and bullet holes. Occasionally, the drills are sprung on teachers and students without warning,” as a student newspaper in Great Neck, New York, observed. A Pennsylvania teacher commented that she was “more traumatized than trained” after teachers were shot with airsoft guns by a fake active shooter. “We had colleagues shooting colleagues, we had people getting hit with [plastic] pellets.… People were screaming, trying to run. People were tripping over each other. It was just horrendous,” Elizabeth Yanelli recalled.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/banning-guns-will-not-make-schools-safe