This
week's horrific shootings in Arkansas have, predictably, spurred calls or more
gun control. But it's worth
noting that the shootings occurred in one of the few places in Arkansas where
possessing a gun is illegal. Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi the three
states that have had deadly shootings in public schools over the past
half-year all allow law-abiding adults to carry concealed handgun for
self-protection, except
in public schools. Indeed, federal law generally prohibits guns within
1000 feet of a school.
Gun
prohibitionists concede that banning guns around schools has not quite worked
as intended but their response has been to call for more regulations of guns.
Yet what might appear to be the most obvious policy may actually cost lives.
When gun control laws are passed, it is law-abiding citizens, not would-be
criminals, who adhere to them. Obviously the police cannot be everywhere, so
these laws risk creating situations in which the good guys cannot defend
themselves from the bad ones.
Consider
a fact hardly mentioned during the massive news coverage of the October 1997
shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, Miss.: An assistant principal
retrieved a gun from his car and physically immobilized the gunman for a full
41/2 minutes while waiting for the police to arrive. The gunman had already
fatally shot two students (after earlier stabbing his mother to death). Who
knows how many lives the assistant principal saved by his prompt response?
Allowing
teachers and other law-abiding adults to carry concealed handguns in schools
would not only make it easier to stop shootings in progress, it could also
help deter shootings from ever occurring. Twenty-five or more years ago in
Israel, terrorists would pull out machine guns in malls and fire away at
civilians. However, with expanded concealed-handgun use by Israeli citizens,
terrorists soon found the ordinary people around them pulling pistols on them.
Suffice it to say, terrorists in Israel no longer engage in such public
shootings to respond.
The
one recent shooting of school children in Israel further illustrates these
points. On March 13.1997, seven seventh
and eighth-grade Israeli girls were shot to
death by a Jordanian soldier while they visited Jordan's so-called Island of
Peace. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Israelis had "complied with
Jordanian requests to leave their weapons behind when they entered the border
enclave. Otherwise, they might have been able to stop the shooting, several
parents said."
Together
with my colleague William Landes, I have studied multiple-victim public
shootings in the U.S. from 1977 to 1995. These were incidents in which at
least two people were killed or injured in a public place; to focus on the
type of shooting seen in Arkansas we excluded shootings that were the
byproduct of another crime, such as robbery. The U.S. averaged 21 such
shootings per year, with an average of 1.8 people killed and 2.7 wounded in
each one.
We
examined a whole range of different gun laws as well as other methods of
deterrence, such as the death penalty. However, only one policy succeeded in
reducing deaths and injuries from these shootings-allowing law-abiding
citizens to carry concealed handguns.
The
effect of "shall-issue" concealed handgun laws-which give adults the
right to carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a
history of significant mental illness-has been dramatic. Thirty-one states now
have such laws. When states passed them during the 19 years we studied, the
number of multiple-victim public shootings declined by 84%. Deaths from these
shootings plummeted on average by 90%, injuries by 82%. Higher arrest rates
and increased use of the death penalty slightly reduced the incidence of these
events, but the effects were never statistically significant.
With
over 19,600 people murdered in 1996, those killed in multiple victim public
shootings account for fewer than 0.2% of the total. Yet these are surely the
murders that attract national as well as international attention, often for
days after the attack. Victims recount their feelings of utter helplessness as
a gunman methodically shoots his cowering prey.
Unfortunately,
much of the public policy debate is driven by lopsided coverage of gun use.
Tragic events like those in Arkansas receive massive news coverage, as they
should, but discussions of the 2.5 million times each year that people use
guns defensively including cases in which public shootings are stopped before
they happen--are ignored. Dramatic stories of mothers who prevented their
children from being kidnapped by carjackers seldom even make the local news.
Attempts
to outlaw guns from schools, no matter how well meaning, have backfired.
Instead of making school safe for children, we have made them safe for those
intent on harming our children. Current school policies fire teachers who even
accidentally bring otherwise legal concealed handguns to school. We might
consider reversing this policy and begin rewarding teachers who take on the
responsibility to help protect children.
