(By
Alex Yablon, Slate, 25 May 2022)
Look no further than Texas
Republicans’ responses to this week’s mass shooting in the small town
of Uvalde, the deadliest at an elementary school since Sandy Hook. Speaking to
Newsmax, Attorney General Ken Paxton, the top law enforcement and public
safety officer in the state, said: “We can’t stop bad people from doing bad
things. … We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other
administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”
Of course, this is Texas. It’s not like potential good guys
with guns were thin on the ground in Uvalde. Law enforcement actually engaged
the shooter before he got into the elementary school. Indeed,
as the Austin American-Statesman reported,
it was actually a school guard—a good guy with a gun—who confronted
and failed to prevent the shooter’s entry. For years, though, Texas has
encouraged teachers to pack
heat. In the wake of a 2018 shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas,
Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that encouraged schools to do exactly what
Ken Paxton now demands. It mattered little back then that Abbott was responding
to killings at a school that already
had two armed guards and a plan to put guns in the hands of teachers.
As Republicans like Abbott and Paxton double down on the
same pro-gun proliferation response to every mass shooting, evidence
accumulates that weapons are rarely effective means of deterring or stopping
mass shootings. Last year, a group of
public health scholars published
a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association examining
133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019. An armed guard was present in about a
quarter of the incidents in the study. Those schools actually suffered death
rates nearly three times higher than schools without armed
guards. Similarly, a 2020 review of gun policy research by the RAND Corporation
think tank found
no evidence that the presence of more guns had any effect on gun
violence. Criminologists at Texas State University found that unarmed
staff or the shooters themselves are far more likely to bring a school
shooting to an end than someone with a gun returning fire.
So-called good guys with guns fail to effectively deter or
end mass shootings for a variety of tactical and psychological reasons. For one thing, it’s actually very hard to
shoot straight in a situation like a mass shooting. RAND analysts have found
that even highly trained NYPD officers only hit their intended target in 19 percent of gunfire
exchanges. Winning a gunfight with a shooter only becomes more difficult
when the perpetrator carries a semi-automatic rifle like an AR-15, as the
Uvalde suspect and many others have done. These weapons have a much longer
range and are far more accurate than the kinds of pistols typically used by
police and civilian concealed carriers, allowing shooters to keep responders
far enough away that their own weapons will be of little use. The Uvalde
gunman, for instance, managed
to overpower two officers whom he encountered on his way to the
elementary school.
In the most extreme cases, a single gunman with a
semi-automatic rifle can stymie an entire SWAT team for hours: Back in 2015, a
single gunman assaulting a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood with an AK-style
rifle held
off police for the better part of a day before surrendering. The idea that armed guards and teachers could
deter shootings in the first place presumes mass shooters behave rationally,
weighing risks, when in fact the opposite is true. As the JAMA authors noted,
“many school shooters are actively suicidal, intending to die in the act, so an
armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.” Considering the long odds of taking down a
determined shooter equipped with an assault rifle, armed police and bystanders
sometimes have difficulty motivating themselves to actually engage at all, as
happened so infamously in the Parkland shooting when two
sheriff’s deputies apparently hid from the gunman.
So Republicans’ preferred response to mass shootings
operates in the realm of fantasy. The standard-issue liberal response—to ban
guns in a country where they outnumber people—is at this point not much more
realistic. That’s not to say there is no way to prevent a lot of mass
shootings, however. Civil gun seizure
orders, known as “red flag” laws, are a promising but underutilized means of
preemptively intervening when gun owners show signs they will hurt themselves
or others. If a gun owner makes a threat or behaves dangerously—committing
violent misdemeanors or torturing animals, for example—“red flag” laws allow
family, school workers, medical professionals, and law enforcement to petition
a judge for an emergency temporary order confiscating the dangerous person’s
weapons.
The laws function like more commonplace personal restraining
orders. Many states created civil gun seizure procedures in the wake of the
2018 Parkland shooting (though not Texas), and the NRA even
offered limited support for the measures. A 2019 case study of
California’s law, passed in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, found the
orders were used in 21 cases where gun owners had made credible threats of mass
shootings. It’s at least conceivable that this law prevented other
possible atrocities.
Good guys with guns fail to stop bad guys with guns in the
moment because mass shootings are rare, surprising, and unpredictable events.
Red flag laws are effective because mass shooters are, by contrast, pretty
predictable: They almost always display clear warning signs that they are a
danger to society and themselves. The Uvalde shooter was no
exception: According to friends, he engaged in self-harm, shot a BB gun at
strangers, and expressed a desire to kill. He also posted frequently on social
media about his desire for guns. If Texas had the appropriate legal machinery
in place, the people in the shooter’s life who had been so alarmed by his
behavior might have had an opportunity to act before it was too late.
