Nov 16, 2013 4 min read

The shooting of three students outside Brashear High School in Pittsburgh’s Beechview neighborhood Wednesday, and the stabbing of a 17-year-old student at Morgantown High School in West Virginia the week before, are sure to be used as ammunition by hard-core gun enthusiasts who believe that the answer to violence in schools is arming administrators, teachers and the security personnel who patrol the hallways and grounds.

Though it was carried out before the Brashear shooting, the Upper St. Clair School District has filed a petition with Allegheny County Common Pleas Court asking to arm the three police officers in its schools. Although Superintendent Patrick O’Toole cautioned that no plans are afoot to give them sidearms, they want to have the flexibility to do so should the need arise, though he didn’t elaborate on what the catalyst for that would be. Upper St. Clair parent Brian Vinay told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “I would feel a lot safer knowing there’s additional security. With everything going on in the world today, maybe people would be less inclined to go into schools if they knew there were armed guards.”

Though no one can doubt that Vinay’s heart is in the right place, having armed guards patrol school buildings will almost certainly not stop deranged and determined shooters, and might actually be a detriment to safety, not an enhancement of it.

Keep in mind that shootings on a scale of the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. last December and the killings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 are exceptionally rare. Every day, thousands upon thousands of students attend schools here in Pennsylvania and around the country without incident. While that doesn’t mean that complacency is an appropriate response, there’s a danger in overreacting, and turning schools into armed camps would harm learning and make students less safe, not more so.

Just as several studies have shown that a gun in a home is more likely to harm its owner or a family member than it is to be used against an intruder, the same principle holds in school buildings. What if a guard misinterprets a student’s actions and opens fire? What if the guard mislays his weapon and it gets into the hands of a too-curious or troubled student? Last January, an armed guard at a Michigan school left his weapon in a bathroom used by students. The more guns proliferate in schools, the more likely incidents such as these will occur, with potentially tragic results.

Moreover, there’s little proof that armed guards would pose much of a deterrence to a crazed person, or persons, who are toting assault rifles or other lethal weaponry. A sheriff’s deputy was inside Columbine High School when the midday massacre happened there in 1999, but his gun who was no match for the arsenal being carried by the perpetrators of that crime. Nor could campus police prevent the horrific spree that left 32 people dead and injured 17 more at Virginia Tech in 2007. And even if an armed guard confronts a shooter, the crossfire could hurt a significant number of bystanders, as we witnessed at New York’s Empire State Building in August 2012 when nine people were accidentally hit by police in an exchange with a man who shot a former co-worker.

Putting armed guards in schools is not the way to avert school shootings. Real solutions are greater mental-health monitoring that would identify unstable individuals before they hurt others and, above all, sensible legislation that would stop them from getting their hands on armaments that belong on the battlefield, not on our homes, streets or schools.