As usual Dr. Lott is on top of this. His discussion of this tragedy links to a 5/31/2022 Oregon Public Radio article:
Oregon lawmakers last year gave every public school district in Oregon the option to ban guns from their premises.So why would districts disarm their teachers and staff?
So far, most districts have declined to take them up on the offer.
Since a change to Oregon law in September, just 13% of the state’s public school districts have opted to close an exemption that allows holders of a concealed handgun license, or CHL, to carry weapons onto public property where possessing a gun would otherwise be a felony.
According to an OPB analysis, that list includes some districts in the Portland metro area — though not yet Portland Public Schools — along with far more rural school systems. Among the 25 that have banned guns are districts in Klamath Falls, Myrtle Point, Tillamook, Pendleton, Tigard-Tualatin, Lake Oswego and Woodburn.
The vast majority of the state’s 197 public school districts have, to date, taken no such action...
Backers of policies banning guns in schools acknowledge it’s a small step. Board members in three districts OPB spoke with said they could not point to an incident where a CHL holder or their weapon had caused an issue on school grounds.
“It just allowed us to complete the commitment that we already had in place of having gun-free schools,” said Melissa Barnes Dholakia, chair of the Bend-La Pine school board. The board passed a ban in December, receiving just two comments on the policy, both of them supportive.
For some students, the possibility that lawful guns could cause trouble on campus was a primary driver of their support for a ban.
When the Hillsboro school board enacted the policy in January, a high school student named Ceph Tronco was among those voicing support.
“What I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been hearing about this policy isn’t, ‘Is someone going to be in place to stop an attempted school shooting?’” Tronco said. “It is: ‘Is someone going to have brought a gun into a school grounds that accidentally discharges? Or is somebody going to have the potential to get into a charged argument that escalates because of the presence of a firearm?’”
The bottom line, Tronco said: “We do not want people to be bringing firearms onto our campuses.”
And that worked out so well in Bend. Adults should be making policy not kids, whose knowledge of the world is necessarily incomplete.
Once again the principle that we should make a law to keep guns out of the hands of people for whom no law against murdering others is necessary, a law that no one with murderous intent will be hindered by.
ReplyDeleteAnd Ceph Tronco believes the old gun control chestnut that all shooting incidents resemble two friends getting drunk in a bar and getting into an argument over whether Gina Lollobrigida or Sophia Loren is more attractive, disagreeing until they shoot at each other. I have long objected to that model being used to resolve a shooting incident involving an intruder into a home at 0'Dark -- Thirty and a resident awakened by the screams of his children.
I agree that model is very atypical but in my current mass murder research project, I created a category of QUARREL, where a minor argument escalated completely out of reason to 3 or more dead, and where intoxicants were not involved. (Many did not involve guns.) There are some people too stupid to live and let live.
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