Sorry for the incredibly long quoted text, but I saw it and thought it was worth posting. It’s about school security guards.
When Ed McClanahan first saw the teenager holding a .357 Magnum revolver in the middle of North Thurston High’s commons, the resource officer pointed his gun, but he couldn’t fire. All around the shooter, who had already sent a round into the floor and another into the ceiling, were other students, many running in terror, some frozen in confusion.
“It’s not like on TV,” McClanahan said. “You can’t just start blasting away with your gun. You could hit someone else, and that would be the worst thing in the world.”
He shifted his position, finding an angle that placed the gunman between him and a trophy case on that morning in 2015 in Washington state. McClanahan slid his finger on the trigger, and just as he began to apply pressure, a teacher tackled the 16-year-old.
In the nation’s capital, and in states across the country, lawmakers are debating how best to protect kids in schools, and much of the disagreement has centered on whether to hire more resource officers, arm teachers or do both. The answer to a key question — How effectively can someone with a gun protect a school from someone else with a gun? — is almost always missing from the discussion.
The Post analysis found that gun violence has occurred in at least 68 schools that employed a police officer or security guard. In all but a few of those incidents, the shootings ended before law enforcement of any kind interceded — often because the gunfire lasted only a few seconds. Prolonged attacks, of course, can be even more fraught, as McClanahan’s experience illustrates.
Of the nearly 200 Post-identified incidents of school gunfire, only once before this week has a resource officer gunned down an active shooter. In 2001, an 18-year-old with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun was firing at the outside of a California high school when the resource officer rounded a corner and shot him in the face.
Whether that happened again Tuesday at Great Mills High in southern Maryland — where a 17-year-old gunman was fatally wounded after being confronted by a resource officer — remains unclear; investigators have not said whose bullet ended the teen’s life in an incident that also left two other students injured.
The NRA and other gun rights advocates have long argued that on-campus police deter school shooters. But do they?
The Post analysis shows that resource officers or security guards were present during four of the five worst rampages: Columbine and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marshall County High in Kentucky earlier this year and Santana High in California in 2001.
At least once, however, the threat of encountering resistance influenced an alleged school shooter’s plan. In 2016, a 14-year-old in South Carolina attacked his elementary school rather than his middle school in large part because the latter, investigators said, had armed security.
And, in several instances, resource officers appear to have saved lives without ever pulling a trigger.
In 2010, after a man pointed his .380 semiautomatic pistol at a principal in a Tennessee high school, Carolyn Gudger, a resource officer, drew her own weapon and shielded the administrator. The standoff continued until other officers arrived and killed the intruder, who never fired but refused to drop his gun.
Introducing weapons into schools for any reason, however, comes with real risk.
In 2004, a security guard approached a 16-year-old student she suspected of smoking marijuana behind a high school in New Orleans. After the student pushed her, she later told investigators, he appeared to reach for something under his shirt, so she shot him in the foot. The teen, however, was carrying neither drugs nor a weapon.
Two years ago, a resource officer in Michigan negligently fired his .380 Sig Sauer semiautomatic handgun, sending a round through a wall and ricocheting around a classroom — occupied by 30 students — until the bullet grazed a teacher’s neck, leaving a scratch. The officer, Adam J. Brown, later tossed the bullet in the grass in an attempt to hide the evidence, and he was eventually sentenced to a month in jail.
Those opposed to arming teachers point to incidents like these as the reason. If law enforcement professionals with extensive training to handle firearms make mistakes with them, what might go wrong if educators with far less training carry the same lethal weapons?
Just last week, an armed teacher at Seaside High in California inadvertently fired his gun into the ceiling, leaving two students injured by falling debris and a third by a bullet fragment.
And more than once, suicidal teens have sought out confrontations with armed resource officers at their schools. In 2008, a 17-year-old in California attacked one with a baseball bat in what police said was an attempt to force the man to kill him, which he did. A year later, in South Carolina, a 16-year-old struggling with depression stabbed a resource officer seven times with a bayonet before being shot to death.
For McClanahan, who’s now retired, a resource officer’s most essential role is to intercede well before an act of gun violence occurs. He and senior administrators would regularly discuss potentially dangerous students, and at least 10 times during his decade working in schools, he dealt with kids who had made serious threats, either to classmates or online. In each case, McClanahan said, he and other officers visited the students’ homes and asked to search their bedrooms.
But the teen who fired the two rounds at North Thurston had just recently enrolled. He had a troubled history, McClanahan said, but he’d never made a threat or talked about bringing a weapon to school. Resource officers can only do so much, he said, stressing that, in America 2018, the responsibility to prevent school shootings falls just as much on other students, teachers, coaches, neighbors, friends and, perhaps most of all, parents.
The teenager McClanahan nearly shot, he said, had gotten the .357 Magnum from his father’s sock drawer.
Comes from this article. It’s really long, but it was a really good read. I almost teared up at some parts.