Let me say that I don’t like the situation either. Schools should be an oasis of calm and safety for students. No one wants to think these locations are targets for mass shootings, but they have become so, and it’s tragically been that way for years. Many don’t want to admit it, but it’s a fact. This unwritten rule of schools being off-limits is no longer valid. We need school resource officers at these institutions—the police are required to provide security and maintain law and order. The recent Nashville shooting should end the debate on this subject. The annoying aspect of this debate is that it seems grounded in parents not thinking it looks good. They’re uncomfortable with the idea. Would they rather have their child’s school shot up like the Covenant School in Nashville?
The perception of a school resource officer as an unseemly sight at a school is a silly, suburbanite concern. And I’m using the word ‘concern’ liberally here—it’s drivel. It took fourteen minutes for police to arrive, confront, and kill the transgender Nashville shooter Audrey Hale. It’s not the worst, but more than enough time to kill scores of people. We’re lucky the death toll remained at six; Hale had time to commit more murders. This statistic isn’t meant to smear the heroic actions of the Nashville Police—they saved lives—but to highlight what if the response time was two minutes or less.
A simple search of school resource officers taking down would-be shooters is numerous, and all have a constant theme: they take down the shooters within seconds of being alerted.
In 2018, a school resource officer neutralized an expelled student at Dixon High School in Illinois.
Last year, a police officer in Alabama killed a man trying to enter a school.
In 2013, Karl Pierson attacked Arapahoe High School in Denver in an assault that only lasted 80 seconds after a school resource officer confronted him. Pierson committed suicide, but not before he killed a student with a shotgun.
In 2018, a school resource officer quickly responded to an active shooter incident at Great Mills High School in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. The officer prevented shooter Austin Wyatt Rollins, 17, from committing more mayhem, though he shot and killed 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey.
No policy will ever be one hundred percent. As you can see, not every school resource officer can prevent tragedies, but they can mitigate the body count and save lives when these situations arise. The debate is over: provide funds for police officers to patrol our schools.
It’s also a National Rifle Association-endorsed policy that Newtown, Connecticut, adopted in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. It acts as a deterrent as well. Hale scoped other locations to attack but chose the Covenant School since the other sites had security concerns. The flip side is that there have been instances where these officers do not carry out their duties, as we saw during the Parkland shooting in Florida, which earned the nation's ire for the gross incompetence of local deputies in confronting shooter Nikolas Jacob Cruz. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was another instance where police dragged their feet during an active shooter situation. The killer was murdering the children in the classroom where he had barricaded himself during the attack; police stood by. Again, not every protocol will prevent these attacks, but often, a police officer on campus stops the carnage we saw at Sandy Hook. If polled, this would get supermajority support. The problem is that Democrats probably won’t back these security proposals to keep our kids safe.
