Rapid City writer Ken Steinken expands on the theme I mentioned last week of the Legislature's flip-flops between evidence and emotion. Steinken contends that evidence about real shooting situations supports the educators and law enforcement officials who see House Bill 1087, the school gunslinger bill that our Legislature approved on emotion, putting our kids at greater risk of being shot:
Each year the New York City police department issues a report that analyzes every instance a bullet is fired by one of its 35,000 officers in the line of duty. For 2011 the Annual Firearms Discharge Report estimated that the officers encountered 23 million civilians.
Over the course of the entire year in those millions of interactions there were only 92 times an officer fired his gun. In those 92 instances 19 people were injured and 9 people killed.
My question is where did the rest of the bullets go? Unlike what we sometimes see in movies, police officers only choose to use deadly force when they intend to make somebody dead. They are trained to shoot to kill.
So these qualified professionals were successful less than 10 percent of the time in delivering a fatal shot. They totally missed their target more than 70 percent of the time. Seven out of every 10 bullets discharged potentially strikes an unintended target [Ken Steinken, "Lawmakers: Facts for Texting Ban; Fear for School Guns," Black Hills Knowledge Network via KOTA, 2013.03.06].
Steinken asks us to consider what that high stray-bullet rate will mean in a crowded school where my daughter is trying to get to recess.
Steinken can speak with authority on how to deal with a school shooting. He was present for the closest thing to a school shooting South Dakota has ever seen:
...I was a teacher at Rapid City Stevens High School in September, 1991. So I have been in a school with an armed gunman in the building.
I talked with my fellow teacher, who left his classroom when his 22 students insisted he do so because they were afraid that their classmate-turned-hostage taker might pull the trigger of the shotgun he stared down the barrel of while trying to dissuade his student from following through with his plan.
I interviewed the student who patiently waited for the right moment, four hours after the siege began, when his classmate dropped his guard for an instant allowing him to grab the gun.
We didn’t need more guns in school that day.
Clear-headed, calm, courageous thinking by a caring teacher, the student who grabbed the gun and the law enforcement tactical team, who chose to bypass several clear shots they had to kill the armed student, resolved the crisis without creating unnecessary additional trauma [Steinken, 2013.03.06].
A school gunslinger would not have changed the outcome of the 1991 Rapid City Stevens incident... at least not for the better. And as Steinken says, we do harm to our kids, our education system, and our culture as a whole when we respond to fear with more violence.
Governor Daugaard, surprise us. Look at the evidence. Listen to teachers like Steinken. Veto House Bill 1087.
"school gunslinger bill that our Legislature approved on emotion"
Absolutely not true. The only emotional testimony was from the leader of the teacher's union promoting the fear of guns with a dream about being stalked by security.
Cory,
I found this section of the NYPD Annual Firearms Discharge Report interesting (p. 85):
I concur a 30% accuracy rating is pretty abysmal.
I also agree I don't want unnecessary shooting, as it increases the risk of collateral damage.
However, if someone has committed murder (or attempted to commit murder) on a school campus, and intends to keep doing so, our least worst option may be to resort to good guys with guns, rather than good guys with bare hands, or good guys with wise words and cool heads. Hopefully we never have to resort to the former. We'll be a better society for it.
If someone is shooting your daughter's classmates, and doesn't intend to stop, something needs to be done. Say a police officer intervenes. Say he misses the shooter 7 times out of 10 shots. Say the officer's stray rounds hit two bystanders - your daughter and someone else. Both the shooter and the children die.
I don't imagine it'd be much comfort to know the shooter was prevented from killing even more children... But that's the only comfort available, and the only salvation available to the other classmates.
I hope a mass shooting event never happens in South Dakota. However, if it does, time is of the essence. The fewer funerals we need to have, the better.
You bet, in the extreme situation where a shooter is on a rampage, something needs to be done. I'll even take the horrible innocent-bystander trade-off you describe to stop a larger massacre. But we reduce the trade-off by leaving the guns in the hands of the gun professionals. And we have so many more situations where no one is shooting, and where the presence of a gun on non-law-enforcement hands presents a risk of greater harm, that policies like HB 1087 don't pass cost-benefit analysis.
"where the presence of a gun on non-law-enforcement hands presents a risk of greater harm"
Not true, how many millions died in the totalitarian police state under Stalin?
Even the Cap Journal picked up on ProPublica's story:
http://www.capjournal.com/news/more-gun-laws-equals-fewer-deaths--state-study-says/article_95bcc36c-86ea-11e2-a702-0019bb2963f4.html
From Larry's link:
"But there were outliers: South Dakota, for example, had just two guns laws but few deaths."
Gun deaths has more to do with culture than laws. South Dakota needs to resist the social engineering that UNESCO is doing in the government schools, otherwise we will go down the same path of destruction that happened in Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Nazi Germany.
So, why have embedded school shooters, lil buddy?
I'm not really worried about increased risk of accidental shootings, especially if these sentinels are going to go through training established by the LEO Standards Commission.
I just don't see the point. South Dakota is a pretty non-violent state. There's not enough risk of a mass shooting to warrant the time, effort, and expense of a program, to say nothing about the risk of an accidental discharge.
We should not let the threat of exceptionally rare incidents dictate our policy unless those threats pose dangers of catastrophic nature (meteors, nuclear war, etc.).
Congress just wasted a day or so discussing whether or not the US President had authority to authorize drone strikes on residents of the US.
Interesting, but we give police and law enforcement the power of judge, jury, and executioner of US citizens. We allow police to put on bumpers which remove the crumble zones designed to protect others and themselves. This is another license to kill.
I don't know where I read it earlier today, but within the last couple days, in some other state, an armed police officer accidentally fired his gun in the hallway of the school where he was placed for security. Nobody was injured, he was the only one in the hall. He has been taken out of that position and the school district in no longer placing police officers in the school, until there is further investigation. Accidents can happen, no matter how well trained these armed guards are.
Yep Joan, you did read that correctly. Highland, New York. A very short lived "putting a good guy with a gun in the school" program.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sean-mccutcheon-officer-gun-suspended.php
Now that Gov D has signed this into law, I feel very sorry for whoever the first "sentinel" is that has an accidental discharge, uses inappropriate force, etc.....and is standing there with their pants down to their ankles when all of the lawsuits start flying their way. Now that the legislature has covered their butts on this misguided and wrong-headed law.
I also was at Stevens High, in school in 1991 when the shooter entered that math class. Looking back, if our school security officer was armed (I don't know that he wasn't) from the details I gathered it would not have made a difference. If the teacher in the room was armed, it likely would have ended in someone's death, either the teacher, the shooter, or a random student. The idea that some of my teachers would have been armed, coupled with the level of incompetence some of them displayed during my time there, is enough to ensure I would not send my kids to that school. As previously posted, the chances of this type of event from occurring are astronomically low. To put a wide sweeping policy in place to prevent an incredibly low risk event is pretty ridiculous. Leave the guns alone. Let's focus on prosecuting the criminals we do apprehend. Make the system work. Criminals are emboldened when there are no consequences to their criminal actions.
I appreciate that first-person perspective, Brian.