Would you post a sign announcing that your home is a gun-free zone? Would you feel safer? Criminals don’t obey these signs. In fact, these signs are a magnet for criminals because disarmed victims are seen as easy targets.
A bill in Wyoming, House Bill 172 Repeal Gun Free Zones and Preemption Amendments, has passed the Wyoming House of Representatives and has been received for introduction in the Senate. This necessary legislation seeks to repeal existing gun-free zones. The bill covers public spaces in some legislative sessions and committee meetings, public buildings (excluding law enforcement facilities, courts, prisons, or jails), and public schools and colleges.
One of us, Senator Cheri Steinmetz, has two grandchildren in Wyoming public schools which are remote and have only one traveling School Resource Officer who intermittently visits rural schools in the district. She is proud to be the Senate sponsor and floor manager for the bill in the Senate.
Twenty-five of the 48 schools in Wyoming have armed School Resource Officers, but these uniformed, easily identifiable individuals find themselves seriously disadvantaged in an attack. The University of Wyoming has a fully staffed University Police Department with armed officers.
“A deputy in uniform has a difficult job in stopping these attacks,” said Sheriff Kurt Hoffman in Sarasota County, Florida. “These terrorists have strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can be readily identified as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, ‘Shoot me first.’ My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.”
There’s a good reason air marshals on planes don’t wear uniforms.
If you have an armed officer in a school, don’t make him readily identifiable. Give him a staff position in the school so it won’t be obvious that he is the one person with a gun. But designated officers shouldn’t be the only people who can protect students.
Five Wyoming school districts already allow teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns. Twenty-seven other states have the same policies. In Utah and New Hampshire, any teacher with a concealed handgun permit can carry. In other states, school boards and superintendents decide on the policies. In the thousands of schools where teachers are permitted to carry, no one has been wounded or killed in an attack during school hours.
Only at schools where guns are banned have people been wounded or killed in school shootings. Despite concerns about students getting a hold of weapons or armed teachers losing their tempers, these scenarios have never actually materialized.
Time after time, mass public shooters avoid places where people have guns. The attacker in last year’s Covenant School shooting even made this explicit in her manifesto. “There was another location that was mentioned, but because of a threat assessment by the suspect of too much security, they decided not to,” said Nashville Police Chief John Drake. Unfortunately, no one at the Covenant School had a gun to fight back with.
By identifying and targeting gun-free zones, attackers can ensure they will be the only armed people present. The perpetrator of the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York, wrote in his manifesto: “Areas where CCW permits are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack.”
Unfortunately, national media outlets refuse to report such explicit statements by attackers. Nor do they report that 94% of mass public shootings occur in places where civilians are banned from having guns.
Gun-free zones attract attackers. The penalties for violating gun-free zones are severe for law-abiding citizens, but the threat of a few years in prison means nothing for someone facing mass murder charges. The law just ensures only the murderer will have a gun. It’s no wonder that surveys show that criminologists and economists strongly support abolishing gun-free zones in places such as schools.
Instead of using signs declaring that schools are gun-free zones, let’s put up signs warning attackers that select teachers have concealed handguns and are prepared to protect students.
John Lott is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Senator Cheri Steinmetz represents Goshen, Niobrara, Weston Counties.
