Equipped Safety Guard on Duty and the NRA Is Dumb

If you didn't bear witness to the most disastrous press conference in recent history today, courtesy of NRA managerial associate leader Wayne LaPierre, here is the gist of the NRA's reaction to last week's Sandy Hook massacre: the NRA wants to put a unpaid assistant force of equipped guards in every school in America. They call this plan the "National School Shield," and they consider it will prevent more school shootings from happening. "The only way—the only way—to stop a enormous from killing our kids is to be individually involved," said LaPierre, "and the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a high-quality guy with a handgun."

You can call the push stunt the NRA pulled today a lot of things—insensitive, amateurish, stupid—but one term will suffice: It was pathetic bullshit, and the NRA should be embarrassed of itself.

Let's pretend that American gun civilization isn't previously a travesty of tremendous extent, and that American guns don't kill more than 80 people per day, on typical. Let's pretend that the NRA's entire raison d'être isn't to allow as many people as potential to own as many guns as potential. Let's pretend that the Second alteration wasn't created at a time when a militia seemed like a feasible plan for general security and not a laughable, paltry joke. Let's pretend that studies that where there are additional guns there are extra killings. Even if all that were true, might the NRA's declaration that putting a pistol in every school would go a long way toward stopping school shootings? totally fucking not, and it is dumb to say so.

Disregarding the fact that armed guards are people themselves, and thus fallible and inclined to the kinds of brain disorders that might cause somebody to shoot up a school of children, here's a fun fact: Columbine High School, the site of one of the most recognized school shootings in American the past, employed an armed guard, Neil Gardner, at the time of the slaughter. And how did that work out? CNN has the report:

After the swap of gunfire, Harris ran back into the building. Gardner was able to get on the police radio and called for support from other Sheriff's units. "Shots in the building. I need somebody in the south lot with me."

Columbine had a good guy with a gun, and the bad guys with the guns killed a bunch of kids and then stopped themselves.