“[W]e need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work —and by that I mean armed security,” declared NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre at this morning’s press conference, breaking his organizations week-long silence following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that left 20 children and 6 adults dead.
After blaming gun control, violent video games, Hollywood and political opportunists for America’s latest mass shooting, the LaPierre argued that the solution to school shootings is armed guards. Not just any armed guards, but special NRA-approved, security industry armed guards.
It sounds to me like the NRA is trying to exploit the legitimate fears stoked by last week’s horrific massacre to expand the market of the private security industry. This is disaster capitalism 101 (thank you Naomi Klein for giving us the tools to recognize the “Shock Doctrine” in action).
Lapierre says that the NRA is devoting all of it’s resources to developing a “National School Shield Emergency Response Program for every school that wants it,” which will include such services as “armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training.”
To lead this new school security program, the NRA has chosen none other than former Congressman Asa Hutchinson because “His experience as a U.S. Attorney, Director of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security will give him the knowledge and expertise to hire the most knowledgeable and credentialed experts available.”
What kind of experts would a former DEA and DHS head turn to for armed security? Here’s Tim Shorrock’s educated guess:
As Hutchinson, a former congressman from Arkansas, was speaking, I looked up his lobbying firm, The Hutchinson Group, which I remembered has numerous clients in national security. Sure enough, he’s got plenty – starting with Blackwater, the notorious private security firm, and SAIC, one of the largest and most important contractors in the Intelligence Industrial Complex.
Shorrock literally wrote the book about outsourcing national security, so he knows what he’s talking about.
My team of experts will be independent and will be guided solely by what are the best security solutions for the safety of our children while at school…First, it would be based on a model security plan … a comprehensive strategy for school security based on the latest, most up-to-date technical information from the foremost experts in their fields.
This model security plan will serve as a template … a set of best practices, principles and guidelines that every school in America can tweak, if needed, and tailor to their own set of circumstances. Every school and community is different, but this model security plan will allow every school to choose among its various components to develop a school safety strategy that ts their own unique situation, whether it’s a large urban school … a small rural school, or anything in-between.
Shorrock points out that police forces are too stressed to fill these positions as are private security contractors whose services in Iraq and Afghanistan “will soon be heading to guardmore embassies in Libya and elsewhere if the State Department has its way.” Shorrock continues:
So who will Hutchinson recommend? Well, Blackwater has had its problems, as the journalist Jeremy Scahill has been reporting for years; but under its latest cover name, Xe (oh, wait, that was the last one – the new one is Academi) could easily sneak by as a legitimate contractor. After all, it’s still working for State despite its sordid record in Iraq and Afghanistan. SAIC, too, could fit the bill, and it’s desperate for more work afterlosing a huge Pentagon contract recently to Lockheed Martin. Plus it’s lost a lot of credibility due to a massive corruption scandal in New York that cost the company $500 million in fines. Not to mention its role in the National Security Agency’s TRAILBLAZER privatization project, one of the largest failures in the history of U.S. intelligence.
There’s plenty of other companies to fit the bill. Many of them are represented by the National Association of Security Companies, which has probably already contacted Hutchinson to get the ball rolling.
The Washington Post’s Brad Plumer quickly countered the NRA, explaining that armed guards make students feel less safe and there’s no proof that they work to stop mass shootings:
1) About one-third of public schools already have armed guards. “Across the country, some 23,200 schools — about one-third of all public schools — had armed security staff in the 2009-10 school year, the most recent year for which data are available,” reports The New York Times.
2) Arming the other two-thirds would cost at least $2.5 billion. The average police officer makes $55,000 per year. So figure that arming the rest of the nation’s public schools would cost about $2.5 billion, at a minimum. In the context of the vast federal budget, that’s not a lot. That said, as Ezra Klein has noted, school shootings are relatively rare. Gun violence is a problem in the United States, but it happens all over the country, not just in schools. So one question is where police resources could best be put to use.
3) There’s some research to suggest that armed guards make students feel less safe — and that may make learning harder. A 2011 study in the journal Youth Society found that the presence of armed guards in schools made many students feel less secure at school. (Though there was a racial divide: White students felt less safe, but there was no change for black students.) Another recent journal article reported a few detrimental impacts from security measures like armed guards and cameras at public schools. Still, this is a relatively new area of study.
That’s not a trivial consideration: “We know that students who feel safe, supported, and connected in school (psychological safety) tend to have better social, behavioral, and academic outcomes,” Eric Rossen of the National Association of School Psychologists told me by e-mail.
4) It’s unclear what effect armed guards would have on school shootings or other types of violence. It seems intuitive that having better security at school would stop shootings, but there isn’t a lot of good research on this. One 2009 study found that schools with “resource officers” — security officials, though not necessarily armed — didreport less criminal activity. But the paper lamented that there’s little evidence on the effectiveness of security measures like surveillance cameras, metal detectors, or armed guards.
Furthermore, Plumer points out that despite the presence of an armed “community resource officer” at Columbine High School in 1999, two students were still able to go on a shooting rampage, killing and wounding their fellow classmates and teachers.
Leave it to the NRA to change the narrative from the need for common sense gun laws to the need for armed security at elementary schools. Instead of focusing on the root of the problem, GUNS, we’re supposed to invite Blackwater’s latest incarnation into our schools.
Are they trying to turn America’s schools into battlefields between deranged mass killers and Blackwater? Is there even a difference between the two?