School Guns and Non-Disaster
“Teachers carrying guns … “
Want to start an argument? Utter that line at a cocktail party.
But is it a problem, a solution, or both? As for as being problematic, it largely isn’t.
Takeaway
- The number of gun discharges on campuses in almost immeasurably small.
- Most of the problems are police/security having accidental discharges.
- These account for 0.04 incidents per year per state.
The Iffy Data
One of the gun control advocacy groups created a “scare the public” web page 1 listing instances of adults with a gun on “school” grounds. We put quotes there because more than a few of the schools on the activist organization’s roster were vocational schools and colleges. When discussing “arming teachers,” the public tends to visualize this as pertaining to K–12 schools only.
But that isn’t the only defect in their raw data. They extracted the tally of incidents from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), and we have previously noted that GVA is not a gold standard data source, by any common definition. As computer nerds say [ED: and Gun Facts founder Guy Smith is one of those], garbage in, garbage out.
But laying data quality issue aside, and assuming the gun control advocacy group did not monkey with the data, we have a rather un-shocking perspective on how arming teachers might or might not be problematic.
The data in question spans the years 2014 through 2021. Perhaps 2020 and 2021 should have been omitted since those were COVID pandemic years and many schools were shuttered. But we left the entries just to be as pessimistic about authorized guns being on campus as possible.
In their tally, anyone authorized to have a gun on campus was included. This included sheriffs on duty, parents waiting in parking lots, resource officers, administrators, security guards, and, yes, teachers.
Low Numbers and Lower Rates
For this period, there were 107 instances of guns on campus in a possibly/actually endangering situation. But in 72% of those, no shot was fired, and 57% were instances that were of no immediate endangerment (in 36% the gun was left somewhere, or handled in a way that a student could access it, such as leaving the gun in a bathroom stall, or bringing one onto campus when not authorized).
Let’s ingest those high-level number for a moment. Of all incidents, 72% did not involve a gun being discharged and 57% had no immediate endangerment to students. Additionally, 34% of states had no recorded incidents whatsoever in this period. So far, it isn’t sounding like a massive problem. But we need to scratch below the surface a little.
How Guns Were Involved
The problem with the “scare page” by the policy advocacy organization is that details remove much of the fright.
Though nobody wants a gun to be left in a bathroom stall (a frequent issue with police on campus), such lapses in safe possession were the most frequent, but they were also undeadly. In fact, only one instance resulted in a child pulling a trigger and that was not from negligently leaving a gun unattended – “A child pulled the trigger of a gun in an officer’s holster while the officer was visiting his classroom.”
For most worrywarts, the next area of common concern is accidental discharges (ADs). And with this we find both the skewing of the data and how the advocacy “scare page” distorted reality by not summarizing details.
Law enforcement had the largest number of ADs – 64% of them, to be specific. Underlying this data point are two realities, one understandable and the other… not so much.
First, not every state allows non-police to carry guns on campus. Hence, cops are often the only adults at a school with a gun (teenage gang members have them too, but this study doesn’t involve those delinquents). So, cops are statistically more likely to have an AD because nobody else can in these schools.
That’s the understandable bit. The less understandable aspect is that cops should be trained in firearm safety, which begins with firearm paranoia. Cops are a bit notorious for not training often with guns and not always being “cross the T’s and dot the I’s” with guns [ED: Gun Facts founder Guy Smith grew up around cops, married into a cop family, his daughter is a dispatcher, and he has collected his own set of “bad gun handling” horror stories from law enforcement].
That said, there were “only” 16 police/security ADs over this period, or about 0.04 incidents per year per state. That said, zero is the goal.
To get a bit more granular, we see that ADs are the primary issue for any “adult” carrying on campus or a student who gets their hands on a gun an adult brought to the school (such as the incident mentioned above about a kid pulling the trigger on a cop’s holstered weapon).
One interesting aside: teachers – you know, the people who are the center of the current debate – had a much better ratio than cops for discharging a firearm with intent, meaning to control a situation. They had a whopping three ADs across eight years and 50 states, and two “shots fired” interventions. For police/security, all but one were ADs.
Who Gets Shot
Given that guns brought to campus by adults are almost never discharged, and that most of those are accidental discharges by police/security, the question of who gets shot is, for practical purposes, statistically null. But the next curiosity in the data shows that it isn’t (by and large) students.
As noted, most (87%) are on-campus adult gun issues that involve no bullets flying. Of the 13% of instances where someone was hit by a bullet, 7% are either the “adult” with the gun injuring themselves or purposefully attempting/threatening suicide.
Of the three students injured by guns going off, two were hit by bullet fragments from accidental discharges and one by falling debris as an after effect.
Is Arming Teachers Wise?
Since Gun Facts does not advocate, we won’t opine on whether arming teachers is desirable or not.
What we can say is that guns on campus with adults authorized to carry them is not thus far causing a statistically significant (indeed, barely a measurable) problem.
Since armed interventions are the most common mode for stopping mass public shootings, and according to a number of academic papers, a key to deterring attacks, armed school staff might decrease the probability of outside attacks (or at least end them rapidly), before more children are hunted. And in inner-city schools where teen gang members rove armed, it might change the motivation calculation for bringing gang violence onto the campus.
Special note of thanks to Gun Facts volunteer researcher Steve for cross-compiling the data.
Notes:
- Giffords, “Armed adults frequently mishandle their guns in schools.” ↩
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