© 2007 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
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 bullets fired by several players before anyone knew it was a joke. But that was a different time.
The Virginia Tech massacre is the latest in a long litany of school shootings, but it was assuredly not the last. Initially, in school shootings, the only person 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
The society in which the victims lived said they were safer since they were defenseless. They were told 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 they were on the day of the shooting. There are not enough officers to be in every classroom. As you read this, most, if not all, VT classrooms have no defense. In fact, all over
We have a right to resist being killed
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 from carrying 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 10 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, if so will they arrive soon enough? Even when schools lock classroom doors, tapping on the doors opens them.
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 to take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. Are we going to do something about our defenselessness after this classroom shooting, or will more students die before we act?
Swickard is a columnist for Heath Haussamen on New Mexico Politics. 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. Michael’s e-mail address is michael@swickard.com.