Security guards should be armed

Tyler Hagberg, Editor-in-Chief|December 1, 2014

Infographic by Hannah Crawford

Recently more school shootings are occurring and the government is not doing anything to stop it.  Protecting banks and most government buildings with armed guards is a priority to ensure that nothing happens. Sure some banks get robbed but it greatly decreases how often that happens. Twenty years from now, a child that is in a school right now will become the president. Why is it acceptable to leave the future of the United States of America unprotected? There should be armed security guards at every school in the United States of America.

According to schoolshooters.info, there have been 74 shootings since Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. That means there have been 74 shootings in just shy of two years.  According to npr.org 33 of the 74 shootings have not been on school grounds, just near them. Sometimes a student nor staff is even involved in these events.

There is a definite increase in school shootings but as much as schoolshooters.info says? If schoolshooters.info are right, then about 20 percent of all school shootings in the history of the United States have happened in the last three years. On the other side, if npr.org has the correct information then in the last three years we have only had around 10 percent of all school shootings.

Either way both statistics are extremely high and should be taken care of. How hard would it be to put a veteran outside every school? Vietnam vet Joe Allen said, “If you went outside and asked every veteran you saw if they would volunteer for one year to protect a school. By the end of the day you would have half of Minnesota schools protected.”

Veterans like to help people and are kind, polite and honest. He went on to add, “We need people that know how to deal with stressful situations where peoples’ lives depend on the decisions you make.”

Many people see guns as a bad thing, but in the real world they are the only effective deterrent of crime. There are tasers, pepper spray, batons and many more but you can still fight through all of those, a gun gives the user and those he or she is defending the upper hand in the fight.

A gun is only as effective as the user is handling it though. If somebody untrained is given a gun, it will many times make the situation worse instead of better. This is why we need to employ veterans with the task of protecting our schools from potential intruders.

“Yes there is a police force that is competent, and yes they can take care of situations like this, but when they are called many times it’s to late. If I was in school, I would rather rely on a veteran with a gun to stop an intruder rather than calling 911 and hiding in a corner till they get there,” said Allen.

In the end we need to realize that these school shootings are not going to go away on their own, and we need to do something about it. There should be armed security guards at every school in the United States of America.