Another horrible tragedy occurred on Tuesday with the attack on the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. With 19 elementary school students slain, Presidentย Joe Biden was right when he said Tuesday night that Americans have had enough. Unfortunately, his proposals won't solve the problem.
Just as with so many of these attackers, the man who attacked Robb Elementary School picked a place where people wereย banned from carrying concealed handguns. For example, the perpetrator of the Buffalo shooting from a couple of weeks ago wrote in hisย manifesto: โAreas whereโ carrying with a concealed weapon โare outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack.โ
Teachers and staff can carry concealed handguns inย about 30% of Texas school districts, so we don't need to guess how the policy would work.ย Nineteen other statesย also allow concealed carry in schools. Since the year 2000, there has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between 6:00 a.m. and midnight at a school that lets teachers carry guns.
People fear teachers irresponsibly using guns or students obtaining a teacher's gun. But none of that has happened. There has been only one accidental discharge by a teacher in recent years, and that was outside of school hours.
While there have not been any problems with armed teachers, the number of people killed at schoolsย withoutย concealed carry has increased significantly over the course of the last decade.
Biden's speech Tuesday nightย contained one misleading or false statement after another. Instead of trying to bring the country together, it politicized the attack. When mentioning the Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe and Oxford school shootings, Biden claimed that there were 900 instances of gunfire at schools over the last 10 years. But someone committing suicide in a car parking lot at 2:00 a.m., two gangs fighting over drug turf in a parking lot after school hours and an accidental discharge in a firearms training class are not remotely similar to the sort of shooting that happened on Tuesday. Even including lone suicides, accidental discharges (including those by police) and gang fights, the number โ as compiled by my organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, isย about halfย of what Biden claims it is: 470.
Since 1998, there have been a total ofย nine attacks similarย to the Robb Elementary School shooting. Nine is nine too many. But once you adjust for population, there are many other countries, from Germany to Russia to Finland, that have comparable rates of school shootings.
Biden says that we need common-sense gun laws, but what he proposes simply will not help. He doesn't seem to realize thatย over 92% of violent crime in America has nothing to do with guns. Focusing on so-called โassault weaponsโ is not only not going to stop mass public shootings, but it won't make a difference in reducing murders at large.
Only aย small share of murdersย are committed with rifles, let alone โassault rifles,โ and that share has grown even smaller over time. The percentage of firearm murders committed with rifles was 4.8% prior to the federal โassault weaponsโ ban that took effect in September 1994. When the ban was in effect, from 1995 to 2004, the figure stood at just 4.9%. And since 2004, it's been even lower. Based on these numbers, it's hard to argue that the ban did anything at all.
Nor doย most mass public shootings involve โassault weapons.โ Fifty-five percent involve only handguns, and only 11 percent solely involve rifles of any variety.
โWhen we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled,โ Bidenย claimed. In fact, there wasย no drop in the number of attacks with โassault weapons,โ and virtually no change in total mass shootings, during the 1994-2004 ban.
Biden asked Americans why people need โassault weaponsโ to hunt deer. But, in reality, many so-called โassault weaponsโ are nothing more than small-game hunting rifles. The AR-15 platform has just been made to cosmetically resemble a military-grade weapon.
And the goal of semiautomatic guns, of course, is not merely to help hunters. Semiautomatic weapons, which automatically reload the subsequent round into the firing chamber after a single discharge, also protect people and save lives. Single-shot rifles that require manual reloading after each shot may not do someone a whole lot of good, especially if he is facing multiple criminals. That person's first shot may very well miss, or otherwise fail to stop an attacker.
The Uvalde tragedy will inevitably lead to a push for so-call โred flagโ laws, or extreme risk protection orders. You would never know this from the media coverage, but the federal government and every state already have laws on the books that deal with people who are a danger to themselves or to others. These laws are commonly known as โBaker Actโ statutes, though they go by different names in different states. They typically allow police, doctors and family members to have someone held for a mental health examination based upon a simple reasonableness test โ effectively amounting to an educated guess.
These laws focus on mental illness, and they require that mental health care experts evaluate the individual. If a person can't afford a lawyer, a public defender is provided. While judges can choose to involuntarily commit individuals who they believe are dangers to themselves or to others, there is a broad range of other, less extreme options that involve monitoring or mandatory mental care.
But 17 states have nonetheless now adopted โred flagโ laws. Thirteen states have adopted them since 2018, after the infamous Parkland, Florida high school shooting. While โred flagโ laws are discussed as mental health measures and are often promoted to prevent suicide, only one state's โred flagโ law even explicitly mentions mental illness. And none of the states specifically require that a mental health expert be involved in evaluating the person; the only option given to judges is to take away a person's guns.
When faced with legal bills that can easily amount to $10,000 for a hearing, few people find that it makes sense to fight โred flagโ laws just to keep their guns. Judges will thus initially confiscate a person's guns on the basis of a written complaint and โreasonable suspicion.โ When hearings take place weeks later, courts overturn a third of the initial orders. But since few defendants have legal representation, the actual error rate is undoubtedly much higher.
When people pose a clear danger to themselves or to others, they should be confined to a mental health facility. If someone is really suicidal, simply taking away his gun won't solve the problem anyway. If anything, โred flagโ laws harm people who need genuine help; absent such laws, a person contemplating suicide might speak to a friend or family member and be dissuaded from that tragic course of action.
With these laws in place, though, individuals may fear that confiding in someone will result in a report to the authorities, possibly leading to the loss of their ability to defend themselves or their loved ones. Indeed, my own research with Professor Carl Moody at William & Mary actually finds that these lawsย slightly increase suicide rates.
It is well past time that we address these mass public shootings. But let's come up with proposals that matter โ starting with eliminating โgun-free zones.โ
This article originally appeared in Newsweek. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions ofย American Liberty News. Republished with permission.
1 Comment
Will someone news organization, in their meeting with a Democrat politician ask him/her point blank: “DO YOU OR ANY MEMBER OF YOUR FAMILY OWN OR POSSESS A GUN OFANY KIND?”
It will be an eye opener if we find out how many Democrats own guns while they clamor for a ban on guns. I they do, what has Biden done to cease those guns from Democrat politicians?