I live in California. When the weather turns nice, a young man's fancy turns to... bank robbing. We get a lot of bank robbers in California. Some years back, I was pulling into a bank parking lot and saw the guard there in the lot instead of the lobby. And I noticed he was unarmed.
Which, at first struck me a little strange. For one, it ran contrary to all the old TV shows and movies depicting bank robberies, where there was at least one armed guard in every bank. So, if the presence of an armed guard might deter just one robbery, why aren't the banks doing it? If you think about it from a liability standpoint, the bank with an unarmed guard doesn't have to worry about whether or not their guard will accidentally wound or kill someone during a robbery, or whether the presence of an armed guard might cause violence to escalate, causing some of the same liability problems of injured or dead customers and bystanders.
Which seems, on the surface, to coincide with some of the arguments that the pro-gun control crowd put forth: "Arming the teachers could be dangerous to themselves or the students." But, does an unarmed guard serve the same purpose in a school as in a bank?
In a bank robbery, the objective is not to hurt anyone, but to steal as much money as possible, and to escape without being caught and incarcerated. To that end, an unarmed guard in the parking lot could spot suspicious cars or suspicious activity and provide an eyewitness who could testify against the robbers at trial, ruining their chances of living happily ever after on their ill gotten gains. The unarmed man in the parking lot deters the robbers by being someone who could thwart their long term plans.
Apply this same logic to a mass shooting. The deterrence doesn't lie in thwarting the shooter's long term plans, because the shooter has no long term plans. The temperament of the shooter is often suicidal. He doesn't fear being identified for prosecution because he is not planning on being alive that long. An unarmed observer therefore, is not a deterrent. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that in nearly every mass shooting, the event that brings it to an end is when more men with more guns show up, at which point the shooter commits suicide, is shot by someone else or is taken into custody.
The deterrence in arming teachers is not in an open display of strength, but in the uncertainty of where the threat may come from. During the Cold War, conventional wisdom was that if the USSR did not know where all of our nukes and missiles were, that they might not be able to take them out in a first strike and thus not survive American retaliation. Uncertainty is a deterrent.
In Florida some years back, there was a rash of armed robberies of tourists coming from the airports. Rental cars were easily identifiable, so it was likely that an airport rental car would have someone flush with vacation cash and unlikely to be carrying a gun, since they just got off a plane, therefore it was a very low risk venture for criminals. The law was changed to make rentals less distinctive and such robberies decreased dramatically. You see, it was harder for the crooks to tell if the car had a rich tourist, or a Floridian with a gun in the glovebox in it. The uncertainty made them decide the risk was too high.
Some copycats of Columbine and other shootings are obsessed with the "body count", trying to exceed the infamy with higher numbers. However, if they are not aware of who on campus might be carrying or have access to a gun, the uncertainty that they might be stopped before firing a shot, or achieving the twisted notion of whatever glory awaited them might give them pause in their planning. Uncertainty is a deterrent.
And if a suicidal teen is undeterred, better to have a gun in the hands of a teacher, in the line of fire, than behind a car, outside in the parking lot.
Editor's Note: I wrote this about a year ago, saw something shiny, and never finished it or posted it. The recent school shooting in Florida and its aftermath convinced me to let what I had written see the light of day. BTW, I added that last part.
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