George Rebane

The 14dec12 Newtown shootings have raised two distinct issues in the public mind – 1) how to protect kids in school against rogue shooters, and 2) how to quickly politicize public passions and focus them on the progressives' long term program to disarm America.  My 17dec12 post ‘Fire! Ready, Aim – Panic-driven Public Policy’ invited discussion of WHEN and HOW we should proceed to find solutions to protecting kids in school, and admonished the rush to agenda driven ‘solutions’ before we knew the results of the massive investigation now underway in Newtown.

Few commenters cared to wait, and all wanted a rush to judgment which it appeared that each was also enthusiastic to lead.  The predictable divisions emerged instantly and almost all the ‘solutions’ offered contained no substantive reasoning to buttress them.  It was again sloganeering time, and all the old ones were hauled out, dusted off, and shouted across the ideological barricades.

No one even offered an objective (or utility function) that would at least frame a reasonable discussion.  To the simpletons it was simple, don’t we want to save school kids’ lives?  What in hell is complicated about that?!  And since guns were used for the killings, make it impossible for everyone including killers to get guns.  And what in hell is complicated about that?!

More reasoned voices counseled us to make haste slowly , and at least wait until we find out what led to the Newtown massacre.  (Taleb’s ‘procrastination promotes antifragility’ which I’ll cover soon, cf Antifragile – Things that gain from disorder)  But louder voices – led by our President and New York’s Bloomberg – advised proceeding in the heat of public passions lest they cool and let another crisis go to waste.

Enter the NRA, after letting some of the dust settle, to propose the installment of armed security personnel at all schools.  My own contribution was to achieve that security through arming of selected existing school staff, and augment through use of volunteer CCW permit holders from the community.  Such solutions brought out nationwide howls from the country’s leftwing that were appropriately amplified by the lamestream.

In spite of today’s ‘Fire!, Ready, Aim’ approach, we hear of more concerned heads taking appropriate actions to provide for the health and safety of their community’s school children.  Marlboro Township in New Jersey has adopted the NRA approach and will station armed security in their schools.   Also it turns out that other school districts in saner states already have armed school staff (teachers and administrators) on duty in their schools.  Here’s an AP report on a Texas town that is concerned beyond national demagoguery about their kids’ safety.  Things could be looking up, if we let them.

So, the purpose of this post is to dedicate a forum in its comment stream for discussing solutions to halt/reduce the incidence of school shootings, or more comprehensively, to school killings.  And for those discussants whose intellect and temperament allows, I offer a simple objective or utility function – minimize the expected rate of K-12 kids being killed while attending school.  Considering the last twelve years, that death rate is somewhere around 130/12 or 10.8 kids per year (data here).

A taxonomy of solution categories may be structured as follows –

1.    Increase National Gun Control/Confiscation
2.    Provide additional armed security at/on school facilities
2.1.    NRA approach – hired armed guards in schools
2.2.    Israeli approach – armed school staffers
2.3.    Rebane approach – volunteer CCW permit holders and Israeli approach
3.    Revise mental disorder laws to allow early interdiction of potential rogue shooters
4.    Various combinations of above categories
5.    Don’t address the problem and just vilify other solutions and the people who present or support them.  (This is really not a ‘solution category’ but an inevitable ‘response category’.)

[29dec12 update]  Physician and lawyer Dr Robert Bernat writes in today's WSJ a sober piece titled 'A Reluctant Vote in Favor of Armed School Guards'  wherein he observes that "Only one of the proposed responses to the Sandy Hook attack promises to have an immediate, positive effect."  Worth a read, especially by our liberal readers.

[14jan13 update]  As the White House now becomes the architect of the insanely ineffective gun control proposals being aired by the Left, here's some sanity from, of all places, Cal Fire News entitled 'How many kids have been killed by school fire?'