A different philosophy on weapons in school

By MOIRA MACDONALD

Last Updated: 16th October 2008, 3:58am

When it comes to Canada and the U.S., we're so close, yet so far apart. And I don't mean the excitement factor in our respective elections.

A few weeks ago the Ontario Principals Council issued a press release proclaiming, "School Principals Support Calls for Ban on Handguns," particularly calls from Toronto Mayor David Miller and Ontario's Liberal government.

The release said although a handgun ban alone would not make schools safe, "we feel it is important to support any measure possible to decrease the injuries and deaths that handguns cause."

A few weeks before, a story crossed my desk out of Harrold, Texas. Harrold, population 320, sits near the northern Texan border with Oklahoma. Its small, lone school has 110 students from kindergarten to Grade 12.

The school has security cameras and an automatic door lockdown system. The Associated Press story was headlined, "Back to School Includes Weapons."

This wasn't a story of kids toting a personal arsenal to school. This was about a policy allowing teachers to pack some heat along with their lesson plans.

In Harrold, teachers are hand-picked to bring concealed weapons to school as a security measure, and undergo specialized crisis intervention training to boot. Students, though, are expelled if they bring weapons to school.

You can imagine what Harrold superintendent David Thweatt would make of our local handgun ban call: "When you outlaw guns in a certain area, the only people who follow that are law-abiding citizens, and everybody else ignores it," Thweatt said in the New York Times.

The superintendent said the policy was well-researched and approved to prevent a Columbine-like shooting at the school, which is isolated and hard to get to for law enforcement but also exposed to whatever criminal elements may be coming down a nearby major highway.

It's those sorts of schools -- the kind no one would suspect as being at risk -- that are most vulnerable, Thweatt told me.

"Our people just don't want their children to be fish in a bowl," he told the Times.

Rattlesnakes and local wild pigs can also be a threat, he told me.

Here at home, we actually have kids getting shot in school and the biggest thing we hear about what to do is to ban legal handguns; in Harrold, it's teacher's packing a punch -- and the local sheriff is stymied when a reporter asks him when the last murder was. The worst thing that ever seems to happen there is petty thefts.

I doubt most parents around here want teachers bearing arms in the name of school security. But the constant call for a ban on legally held handguns is a whining, broken record that, at best, is only a partial solution to a major problem. At worst, it could turn the illegal gun trade into a growth market.

BAN WON'T ELIMINATE DEMAND

History shows bans never eliminate demand; they just create a whole new criminal subculture and a market beyond official controls.

The well-meaning OPC did not do much research into the details of how a handgun ban would work or what guns are actually being used to carry out crimes -- its members just want to make schools safer.

In fact, Ontario government figures show about 70% of guns seized in crimes here were illegally smuggled from the U.S.

You can ban guns all you want, but if you don't stop them at the border you're only stopping a third of the crime.

More than targeting legal gun owners, what's probably motivating the OPC the most is its hope to get wider support for its own call to institute minimum standards of supervision for students when they're at school but out of class.

That call, believe it or not, has proven to be politically contentious, because it could mean more demands on teachers.

Unfortunately that call is harder to wrap people's heads around than a handgun ban. Too bad. Because only complex remedies have any hope of truly hitting the target.