Last Wednesday, thousands of students across the nation walked out of school, with the support of gun control groups, celebrities, and breathless reporters. On March 24, more students will be marching with Parkland activists like David Hogg, demanding gun control.
Watching the news, you’d think this was a modern day March on Washington, that an unstoppable tide of students was rising up to pressure politicians to pass more gun laws.
But it was no such thing. Out of the more than 25,000 public high schools in the United States, only about 2,500 schools had students who walked out. And there were reports that at some of those schools only one, or a small handful of students walked out.
What exactly were the walkouts calling for?
I know what they were not calling for: safer schools.
Because most or all of their proposals would, at best, make no difference, and more likely, make schools more susceptible to gun violence.
Marchers want to further limit magazine capacities. Some people, like myself, would like the ability to have a higher-capacity gun to protect ourselves and our families. And states like California that require limited capacity magazines have not seen a decrease in violent gun crimes since the law passed.
Marchers reflexively oppose concealed carry reciprocity, which would allow anyone with a concealed carry permit to carry a concealed firearm across state lines.
This should be a no-brainer. The people that have concealed carry licenses have already undergone background checks, training, and are rarely involved in crimes. They’re among the most law-abiding group of Americans out there. And they, more than any other group of citizens, can react on a dime during an active shooter incident, while law enforcement is still minutes away.
The walkouts’ list of demands ends with opposition of, “Any legislation that would aim to fortify our schools with more guns.”
“Fortify” means to strengthen. I don’t know about these students’ parents, but I would only send my two daughters to schools that I felt were adequately fortified against bad guys.
Many of the signs held by elementary, middle and high school students featured signs saying, “Kids > Guns.” But many parents across America need and use guns to protect their kids.
Thankfully, my husband and I have options when it comes to where we can send our daughters. We don’t need to send them to public school for financial reasons. We make financial sacrifices to send them to better schools than the Los Angeles Unified School District can offer.
And school safety is one of the factors we consider. All things being equal, we’d send them to a school with armed guards instead of one without.
But millions of parents don’t have that choice. Democrats have made it impossible for the average parent to have a choice of which school to send their kid to. Private schools are expensive, too expensive for most people. For them, public school is the only option.
That means there’s nothing parents can do if their local public school has lousy security, as is surely the case at many public schools.
Well, there’s something that some parents can do. That is, those lucky enough to live in places that have school choice, particularly those who live in places with school vouchers that give them access to numerous schools.
One silver lining of the Left’s childish, unproductive, temper tantrum about guns is that it could give school choice advocates yet another weapon in their arsenal: school safety.
The case for school choice is already overwhelming and has been well-documented. But people rarely, if ever, discuss school safety as one area that schools ought to compete on; an area that public schools would improve on if competition forced them to.
Good parents who have multiple options will weigh many factors when it comes to choosing a school for their child: teacher-student ratio, test scores, curriculum design, and maybe now campus security. “What is this school doing to protect its students?” should be a question every parent asks. And the schools that aren’t doing much should either “fortify” or close.
If my family were in New York City, where Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio just removed all armed police officers from public school campuses across the five boroughs, I’d enroll my kid in a school with armed security. And if I couldn’t do that, I’d move.
It’s bad enough that the Left opposes school choice, thereby limiting millions of children’s educational and thus professional potential. Now they also want to enact dangerous policies like “gun-free zones” that will only serve to put our children in harm’s way.
Why do Wednesday’s walkouts and their supporters oppose things like armed guards and anything that involves giving guns to well-trained good guys?
No, Wednesday’s walkouts and their supporters oppose any solution that involves good guys having guns, because they just don’t like it when good guys have guns.
They say that they don’t want schools to feel like a “maximum-security” prison. Nonsense. Prisons keep bad guys in. Fortresses keep bad guys out.