Children Doomed by the “Smartest Guy in the Room”

We’ve all been there. You’re trying to help someone who suffers from Not Invented Here. Said another way, unless the “Smartest Guy in the Room” came up with the idea, then it isn’t worth considering. It is frustrating when you find “Not Invented Here” in a business meeting. It is dangerous when the “Smart Guy” holds government office. It becomes frightening when they put our children at risk as they did recently in Tennessee.

I don’t care how smart you are. If you can only accept your own ideas, then you are losing the vast experience of the people who came before you. You are losing the experience of the other people in the room. Speaking from personal experience, those helpful suggestions often included hidden gems even if the suggestions were flawed. Those good ideas could be incorporated into a better solution. Politicians often ignore good ideas because they are more interested in receiving approval than in making an improvement.

Suppose you wanted to keep your children safe at school. The politician asks what solutions the press will accept. In contrast, the security consultant looks at what worked in the past and how those solutions can be adapted to a particular situation. We know how to stop mass-murder at school. Unfortunately, the two approaches are miles apart.

The good news is that mass-murders in our schools are rare. We’ve had none so far in 2024, three mass-murders in schools in 2023, and two in 2022. (1) For perspective, far more children are killed in car accidents and accidental drowning than in mass-murders at schools. These attacks are still too horrific for us to ignore even if they are rare. That said, money and safety issues are real. The question is how we should protect our children without consuming the school budget or turning the school into a prison.

Politicians don’t care about the facts when the press is eager to point the finger of blame. The politician has to have an excuse ready for any outcome. From the politician’s point of view, the worst possible solution is to be blamed for making the situation worse.

The best solution is well known. The most effective prevention is to take down the “Gun Free Zone” sign and replace it with a sign that says “Staff Will Defend Students”. The murderer doesn’t know who is armed and when the defenders are on campus. That seed of doubt is invaluable. We’ve never had a campus attacked that had a publicly announced plan of armed defenders. It turns out that mass murderers avoid a gunfight.

After a murderer comes to campus, the most effective response seems to be a mix of an armed School Resource Officer and armed school staff. We learned that time is everything. We pay for minutes with more dead and injured victims. The solution has to be at the scene when the attack starts.

The politician can hear the hostile questions from the press at the mere mention of guns on campus. We’re supposed to ignore the fact that the politicians and the elites have armed guards. Why do guns belong at city hall but not at kindergarten? We’re supposed to ignore that we call the police precisely because they have guns. Unfortunately, the politician runs from the question if more guns in schools lead to more shootings. The answer isn’t difficult.

In fact, mass-murderers want disarmed victims. The murderers hunt them out on purpose. Time after time, celebrity-seeking murderers attack so called “gun-free zones.” We want fewer inviting targets available for mass-murders.

The inciteful question is ‘When will trained and armed school staff make students safer and when might they make them less safe?’ The answer is profound.

Facts matter. If school attacks never happened then arming school staff could serve no beneficial purpose. In that hypothetical situation, armed staff could only increase risk. When need to look at history. We’ve tested the risks and studied the results. We found that schools have been attacked and the risks from armed staff are vanishingly small. We’ve had millions of school days with an armed staff member on campus. We’ve never injured a student at school with an accidental discharge of a firearm by an armed and trained school staff member who was approved by the school administrators.(2) Yes, that is a mouthful, but it is an important mouthful.

I’ve met hundreds of these volunteer defenders. My experience is that the staff who are asked to defend our students are exactly the type of people we hoped to find. They want to defend their students. At the same time, they feel the moral weight of the gun. They are the best of our communities.

That isn’t what the smartest man in the room concluded in Tennessee. There, his so-called school safety bill said that students should be unprotected whenever they are gathered at events in school stadiums, gymnasiums, or auditoriums. They should be left undefended unless the school staff take 40 hours of police training each year. The way they deliberately left groups of students vulnerable, it was almost as if the bills authors wanted the schools to be attacked.

The bill was bad from the beginning. The training and continuing education requirements for school volunteers are so severe that most schools will remain undefended. That is what we saw happen in other Midwest states. Was that on purpose? By proposing an ineffective school safety bill, the governor gets to say he did something while minimizing the bad press from an accident. It is the perfect bill for the politician. Too bad for the students who are left unprotected, but the politician will never be blamed for those.

Until now.

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Sources-

AN ACT to amend Tennessee Code

1. I am using the definition of mass-murder to include 3 dead victims excluding the perpetrator. Older definitions required 4 dead victims, while more recent ones included the murderer.
2. We know that some law enforcement officers and school staff have been negligent with firearms. So far, members of designated safety team have not.