David Michael Miller
You would expect the chief law enforcement officer of your state to understand at least the basics of crime statistics. But that would be too much to ask of Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel.
"Law-abiding gun owners don’t go out and shoot up schools,” Schimel said in the wake of the Florida high school gun murders last week.
That statement is, to put it mildly, uniformed.
Adam Lanza was a law-abiding citizen right up until the moment he murdered his mother and then killed 20 little kids and six teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school.
Stephen Paddock was a law-abiding citizen before he opened fire on a crowd in Las Vegas and murdered 58 people and injured more than 800.
And Nikolas Cruz was a law-abiding citizen when he walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17.
In fact, most of the 30,000 gun deaths in the United States each year are the result of shots fired by law-abiding citizens. That’s a safe assumption because 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides, and unless we think that criminals are vastly more likely to kill themselves, it’s reasonable to conclude that it’s despondent, law-abiding citizens who take their own lives.
And the whole notion that we can somehow predict which law-abiding citizen is going to go off the rails and shoot up the next concert or nightclub or school is just nonsense. The problem is that our nation is awash in something like 300 million firearms. Nobody knows for sure how many are out there, because we don’t even require that these deadly weapons be registered. Gun registration and licensing for all gun owners would be a modest first step in addressing the problem.
But instead of acknowledging plain reality, Schimel joined President Trump in suggesting that the answer is to allow school districts to arm teachers. His answer to the problem of easy accessibility to deadly weapons is more deadly weapons. Yet, he hasn’t joined Trump in supporting something that actually makes some sense, which is to limit the sale of assault weapons to people aged 21 and older.
You have to ask yourself how Schimel must view the world. Apparently, he envisions a mass shooter entering a classroom, an armed teacher pulling out a loaded firearm (which she must be carrying on her person at all times), recognizing what’s going on in a split second, pulling out the weapon, aiming it properly, and killing the assailant. Then, apparently the teacher would say something like, “Now, let’s finish reading chapter three while I clean this up.”
Schimel says he wants these teachers to be well trained, but even trained police officers have a hard time making split second decisions when they’re called to the scene of an ongoing crime. And, in fact, trained sheriff’s deputies on the scene in Florida apparently chose not to enter the school to shoot it out with the bad guy. The idea that a teacher could adjust to the situation so quickly, make the right decision, and execute it without killing or injuring her own students, is just too much to expect of anyone.
Schimel might want to talk with Joe Myrick. Myrick was an assistant principal in Mississippi in 1997 when he used a gun he had kept in his truck to stop a school shooter who ended up killing two students. But Myrick doesn’t support arming teachers. He supports more gun control.
“If Luke Woodham (the assailant at Myrick’s school) had an AR-15, he probably would have killed 20 people instead of two,” he said in a New York Times story. “There’s not a soul on the planet who needs an AR-15 except military.”
The NRA’s worldview of armed teachers and hardened targets and endless bloodshed spilled on the altar of an insane absolutist view of gun rights is dangerous enough when practiced by the slim minority of citizens who are gun zealots. When that point of view is shared by a state’s chief law enforcement officer, it raises the question of whether he’s fit for his job. Answer: he isn’t.
