Excellent Piece on Preventing School Shootings

...from our friend Dave Kopel at the Independence Institute, via NRO:

...I simply suggest that teachers and other school employees be allowed to carry if they obtain a handgun carry permit. If a school wants to require special additional training for school carry, that’s fine.

Some people who do not like the idea of teachers being armed to protect students simply get indignant, or declare that armed teachers are inconsistent with a learning environment. I suggest that dead students — and the traumatic aftermath of a school attack — are far more inconsistent with a learning environment than is a math teacher having a concealed handgun on his body.

Dave's article is by far and away the most comprehensive and thoughtful piece I've read on the subject. Just as interesting is the fact that Dave makes some closing points that all of us need to consider:

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.

The antigun movement in most Western cultures has ultimately proven to be more anti self-defense rather than specifically antigun. Certainly we see the clearest expression of this in the hapless Great Britain, where it is now illegal to even use harsh language against an attacker. Or the equally sad case of Scotland, where in the 1700s my distant ancestor Donald Bane wrote the standard text on fighting with a claymore . Draconian restrictions on possessing and purchasing knives are going into place, no doubt to be followed by rigid restrictions on possessing sticks and stones.