Your Brain Under Fire
Kiyotaka ISHIKAWA
Gunfire in playing Call of Duty is made in simple combination of your lefthand’s adjusting the stick at enemies and your righthand’s squeezing the trigger with a game-controller. Only these processes sometimes fails or delays in your excited hands when you see that your enemies also point their guns at you which looks about to fire. Such a mistake is a part of the mixture of pleasure and stress in the virtual gunfight, but, in the real gunfight, under much more complex and dynamic situations, that might cause you or those who you need to protect killed in a moment. Are armed guards in U.S. schools really more capable of protecting children from active shooters than banishing all firearms from the country?
Increasing schools guarded by armed security
About a third of all public schools in the United States already have armed security, and that number may increase after the Newtown shootings, as the NRA’s chairman stated, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” However, shooting down a bad guy without unintended shots on innocent people requires highly trained skills and minds. Actually, average NYPD hit rate during a gunfight is only 18% when the target is shooting at officers, while it marks 30% when the target dose not fire back (TIME, issued Jan 28, 2013). Moreover, if hiring an officer or armed educator for the case of school assault, we always have to concerns about the high risk that they will shoot a child by accident.
Possess a gun not only for shooting someone
It is considerable that the presence of armed teachers or guards could deter a shooter from attacking so that there would be no need to perform well in a gunfight. In fact, New York City police officers rarely fire their weapons in the duty, but the silent presence of officers’ weapons surely influences the behavior of citizens around them. Many gun-rights advocates also worry that vulnerability of gun-free schools may attract shooters, pointing out the deterrent function of keeping the armed security.
Need to consider shooter’s uncertain motive for assault
It is difficult to know if mass murderers apply such logic when choosing targets; not all of them simply seek the most violent crime scenes in order to create socially sensational shock. In the case of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, for example, the attacking students were aware that their school had an armed officer, who eventually failed to stop the mass murder. Also, some studies shows that two thirds of shooters attack their own communities, no matter which they are easy targets or not, just like the case of Columbine.
From these perspectives, it is unsure that making every U.S. school protected by armed guards or teachers, even if they are well-trained for emergency, could prevent tragedies like the Newtown’s case for ever, though at least that will minimize the number of such cases happen or victims. Of course, nothing is better than banishing all guns, if putting aside huge political and operational costs that will take in the society where gun-rights are deeply rooted.
