In an earlier post, I recommended that school staff, including teachers, who were willing, trained, and supervised be allowed to carry guns for the sake of the schools’ safety. Shortly afterwards, the head of the NRA made a public recommendation that every school be provided an armed guard. In my post, I had pointed out how an armed guard would be ineffective. Since LaPierre’s statement, many critics have also done the arithmetic on the idea and shown its impracticality.
Yeasterday, Ron Paul weighed in with the libertarian insight that turning the schools into a TSA-type guarded compound would be an unacceptable advance into an Orwellian nightmare. Although I agree with this much, his statement also went so far as to disapprove of arming the staff themselves, claiming instead that “real change can happen only when we commit ourselves to rebuilding civil society in America, meaning a society based on family, religion, civic and social institutions, and peaceful cooperation through markets.”
Paul’s statement needs a couple of corrections.
First, armed citizens do not constitute a police state; instead, we are freemen who fear neither the state nor one another. Allowing teachers the freedom to defend themselves is just basic Americanism.
Second, society did not massacre the children at Sandy Hook and rebuilding society will not stop the next massacre. Paul is certainly right about the value of freedom for improving civil society, but that is really a different issue. Evil men will always try to prey upon the weak, even in the best of societies. The weak must be protected by the strong.