NRA mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre came in for no shortage of sneering derision when he proposed putting armed guards in America’s schools after Sandy Hook. But despite all the feigned horror and elitist scorn, even Barack Obama himself has come around to the the NRA’s way of thinking. After all, number 18 on the President’s hit parade of 23 executive orders was “provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.” For those unfamiliar with bureaucratese, ‘school resource officers’ are otherwise known as armed security guards. Off duty cops. And yesterday the wisdom of the NRA’s approach played out at Price Middle School in Atlanta when an armed resource officer disarmed a kid with a firearm who had just shot a 14-year-old fellow student in the neck . . .
From an AP report via sltrib.com:
Investigators believe the shooting was not random and that something occurred between the two students that may have led to it.
Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis said the school does have metal detectors.
The only problem with those metal detectors was that the shooting took place outside the school. But an off duty resource officer was there.
The armed resource officer who took the gun away was off-duty and at the school, but police didn’t release details on him or whether he is regularly at Price. Since 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December, calls for armed officers in every school have resonated across the country.
The calls have “resonated.” Translation: school districts and parents want their children protected by someone with the ability to respond to an active shooter while media mavens and the commentariat have relentlessly ridiculed the idea as militarizing our schools. Instead, they see more gun control and restrictions on law-abiding firearms owners as the path to the nirvana of truly gun-free zones in which post offices, shopping malls and elementary schools are somehow made safe from murderous headcases. If you’re very quiet and listen very closely, you can hear Wayne enjoying the last laugh.