How To Make Our Schools Safe

What do we do about the school shootings? Ban handguns? Make schools into secure zones like airports? What do you think?

Dave Kopel takes a look at the situation in NRO. He proposes a menu of common-sense protection for our children.

To start with, don’t put the perpetrator’s face on magazine covers. We don’t want them to achieve celebrity with their evil deeds.

Then there must be active defense. The cluelessness of Columbine where police and SWAT teams sat outside while the killers killed inside has fortunately been fixed.

Now, the standard police response to an “active shooter” is immediate counter-action. For example, at a March 2001 attack on Santana High School in Santee, California, the police response was immediate, and saved lives. It was the first time ever that a school shooting had been met with prompt police counter-action.

Are anti-bullying programs the answer? Hard to tell, but one thing that works is for students to come forward and warn school authorities about developing problems. It’s the old truth about policing. It can do nothing without informants.

It’s important for would-be assailants to understand that schools are not soft targets. That’s why gun-free zones are not a good idea.
But it is a good idea for assailants to fear that someone at the school may be carrying a weapon.

But what about self-defense training for students? Shooting incidents are not like muggings. Shooters are interested in killing people. So potential victims can best help themselves by taking out a shooter before he gets control of a situation.

Self-defense training also teaches that it is dangerous to let a criminal take control of your surroundings; even if a criminal is pointing a gun at you, you are probably better off to try running away, than to let him put you in a car where he can transport you to an isolated location.

But some people are outraged by self-defense proposals.

[To them] the idea that teachers and students should be encouraged to learn active resistance is outrageous.



Our nation has too many people who are not only unwilling to learn how to protect themselves, but who are also determined to prevent innocent third persons from practicing active defense. A person has the right to choose to be a pacifist, but it is wrong to force everyone else to act like a pacifist. It is the policies of the pacifist-aggressives which have turned American schools into safe zones for mass murderers.



School shootings are the ultimate form of bullying, and long experience shows that the more likely and more effective the resistance, the less the bullying.

You can see the tenor of Kopel’s ideas. There is no substitute for people capable and willing to defend themselves from aggression.