Guns-in-schools lunacy comes to Oregon

Kari Chisholm

OPB and the Register-Guard report that the Harrisburg School Board is considering a policy that would allow school district employees to come to work packing heat.

Tonight, one board member tried to wave off concerned community members by saying that it shouldn't be teachers.

“My personal belief is, I don’t want teachers with our kids handling a gun,” board member Anthony Knox told a room of about 20 people at the high school library.

Knox said he was the one who had earlier suggested that the board look at potentially arming some staff members as part of a district plan to improve school security.

Now, activists and ideologues can sit here and argue about whether arming teachers -- or principals, or custodians, or coaches, or whatever -- will make schools more safe or less safe. But the professionals tasked with accurately assessing and monetizing risk are making their judgment crystal clear.

Just last month, the insurance company that insures over 85% of all Kansas school districts announced that it would drop coverage for any school that allows concealed guns on campuses.

David Sirota has the absolute best take on the issue, noting that insurance is the closest we have to a free market in this country.

[P]rivate insurance is the conservative ideologue’s favored method of assessing danger and managing risk, for it is a purely free-market instrument. Indeed, as a right-wing activist would readily admit, private insurance focuses exclusively on the dollars and cents of actuarial analyses, and it bases prices on data and empiricism, not on fact-free political ideology and poll-tested platitudes.

[I]n the gun case, insurance actuaries’ evaluation of risk ended up discrediting the arms-race ideology of the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, who infamously called for more guns in schools on the assumption that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

So, right-wing principles of free-market capitalism have perfectly skewered right-wing ideological talking points. That's kind of awesome.

By Kari Chisholm Aug. 13, 2013