Back in the 1970s - the high-water mark for the gun contorl movement, - a gun control group tried to do the pre-internet version of "going viral". They gave out lawn signs proclaiming the associated house to be a "Gun Free Home".
They were pulled out of circulation pretty quickly, as the police determined that homes displaying the signs were astronomically more likely to get burglarized or robbed. They were a trivia question by the end of hte decade.
Similarly, here in Minnesota as in several other states, the advent of "shall issue" carry permit legislation was accompanied by a provision allowing businesses to display "Firearms Prohibited" signs on theie front doors. They vanished quicker than the last few Madonna albums after it was noticed that those were the bars that kept getting held up.
Turns out that criminals, whatever their motives - robbery, burglary, or what have you - do have senses of self-preservation. The threat that one of their potential victims might not be inclined to be a victim affected their admittedly-dubious decision makiung processes.
So - if only there was a way to do somethig smilar with schools.
Am I right?
Speaking of motives - the shooter at the Minneapolis Catholic school's were pretty clear about his:
Disturbing decoded parts of the Minneapolis trans mass sh—ter’s manifesto reveals he picked the Annunciation Catholic Church and school, where he once went and where his mother had worked, because it’s a “liberal school [that] does not allow teachers to carry [firearms].” https://t.co/q9kj1JXVWo
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 28, 2025
We know that spree killers often specifically pick out what they know to be "soft targets" - places where nobody can resist them:
You would think the empirical evidence would be overwhelming at some point. When the Aurora, Colorado Batman movie theater shooter attacked, seven movie theaters were showing “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20th within 20 minutes of the killer’s apartment at 1690 Paris St, Aurora, Colorado, but the killer picked the only theater that had signs posted that it was a gun-free zone. His first target had been an airport, but he worried about their “substantial security.” Similar stories have occurred at malls such as in Omaha and Salt Lake City or the Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater. Despite teachers carrying guns in schools in 20 states, all the shooting attacks at schools have occurred in schools that ban teachers from having guns.
Given that people are allowed to carry their permitted concealed handguns in the vast majority of public places, if these mass public shootings were random, 95% or higher of these attacks would take place in areas where permitted concealed handguns were allowed. Instead, the reverse is true, with 94% of those attacks taking place where general citizens are banned from having guns.
And that includes the shooter in Minneapolis last week, who could not have written the lede more clearly:
It turns out that it wasn’t an accident that attack in Minneapolis occurred at a gun-free zone. The murderer’s manifesto makes it clear that he purposely picked a gun-free zone. The murderer wrote his manifesto in Russian, but here is the relevant translation.
“I recently heard a rumor that James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter, may have chosen venues that were ‘gun-free zones.’ I would probably aim the same way . . . Holmes wanted to make sure his victims would be unarmed. That’s why I and many others like schools so much. At least for me, I am focused on them. Adam Lanza is my reason.”
Information on the Aurora movie theater shooter picking a gun free zone is available here and here.
So - given that spree killers specifically pick out "gun free" zones to carry out their atrocities, and mostr schools are "gun free zones", isn't there an obvious approach, here?
Anyone?
I don't want to keep seeing the same hands, here.
How about dispensing with the fiction of the "gun free school zone"?
There are about 25,000 school districts in the United States. About 95% of them are "gun free zones".
And about 1,000 of them are not - some of them, going back 254 years or more.
And there's a paraticularly startling correlation, here:
Twenty states currently allow teachers and staff to carry guns to varying degrees on school property, so we don’t need to guess how the policy would work. 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 AM and midnight at a school that lets teachers carry guns.
At some of those districts, there are training requirements. At others, staff who are otherwise qualified just carry their own legally-permitted firearms, and nobody's the wiser.
But whatever the rules, the results - no shootings of any kind on school grounds for the past 25 years - is pretty clear.
"Correlation doesn't equal causation", some may respond. That's true. And when a fire truck pulls up to a burning building, they don't start figuring out causation; they put out the fire.
If innocent people getting killed by narcissistic psychopaths isn't a metaphorical fire that needs to be spraeyd with, er, water before worrying about "causation", I'm not sure anything is.
Now, I've mentioned this idea in the past to some of my Democrat friends. And they've reacted in theatrical horror. "Oh, HELL no", one said.
To which I respond "why?" I'm talking about a voluntary policy, that costs virtually no money, and most importantly that has been 100% effective...
...and, in fact, doesn't necessarily require a single teacher, principal, coach or janitor to carry a firearm. The likelihood of someone being armed is the primary deterrent.
The responses all tend to boil down to personal social aesthetics and political dogma. Chanting points. "Teachers shouldn't HAVE to yadda yadda".
And there's a point, there. Teachers - people in general, really - shouldn't have to deal with the retrograde, and downright evil, all around us. A society where nobody did venial, mean, or evil things to each other would be a fine place indeed, wouldn't it? Humans in a decent works shouldn't have to lock our doors at night, chain up our bikes, or worry about what evil people want to do with our kids. People should be nice and not doi evil things.
But they aren't and they do. It made Chris Hansen a millionaire. And it's adults job to act appropriately to do somehting useful about it.
Note to the usual crowd of gun grabbers who are trying not to waste this crisis: I said do something useful..
The rational ones react by finding responses that work.
I've yet to see a negative response to this idea that wasn't rooted in pure personal social aesthetics - as if having the means to defend oneself and those around them is some sort of fashion faux pas.
