Gainesville City Schools (Georgia) are considering whether to allow armed security guards on campus to store police-provided AR-15s in locked gun safes on campus to defend schools against active shooter situations.

You can hear clueless anti-gunners freaking out already, can’t you?

Get ready for the fireworks:

Gainesville City Schools is looking into letting campus police officers at three of its eight schools use assault rifles.

The charter schools are considering allowing officers to bring a semi-automatic police assault rifle into the school and keep in a locked safe while they are there.

Right now officers only have pistols.  The rifle has twice as much ammo, fires three times farther and is more accurate.

By having it in the school, their reasoning is the officer can react more quickly and effectively to a heavily armed intruder.

The three schools are charter schools and their governance councils plan on discussing and voting separately.

We can expect Moms Demanding Denial and Avoiding Common Sense and their parent group, Mayors Against All Guns, to flip out over this proposal to bring “evil black rifles” into these schools, because their positions are those of fear-driven neophytes.

That’s a shame, for the kids.

Quite frankly, the author of this article doesn’t do nearly enough in describing how much more advantageous an average AR-15-style rifle is in the hands of an average school guard (or any average shooter). Rifles are not just easier to shoot accurately under stress than handguns, but when paired with the right sort of ammunition and optics, can be both much more effective in stopping a threat with an accurate shot, and pose less of an over penetration threat, both vital considerations in a crowded school environment.

An average 9mm or .40 S & W service pistol carried by police and armed security guards generally feature open sights and magazines of about 15 rounds (give or take a few each way depending on model). The same officer/guard then carries two spare magazines on his/her belt, for a grand total of roughly 45 rounds of ammunition.

Most shooters are only going to be reasonably accurate with these firearms under stress to a distance of just 7-10 yards. This is why so many shootings (regardless of who is involved) end up with the target being fired upon missed repeatedly, or only suffering perimeter wounds, while those downrange suffer the brunt of the damage. This is compounded by the fact that service pistol ammunition designed for police use (which security forces and concealed carriers alike tend to adopt for legal liability reasons we don’t have time for here) also tends to be designed for penetration; there is the distinct possibility that bullets fired into a suspect will continue on through entirely or in fragments to hit students and staff downrange.

A situation that illustrates what happens as a result of these factors was a shooting in New York City just over a year ago: police fired at a armed suspect 16 times, hit him ten times, and wounded nine innocent bystanders, many with bullets and bullet fragments that exited the suspect.

If the Gainesville schools use quality hollowpoint or frangible ammunition, their AR-15s will have more effect on what they shoot than a pistol bullet (more energy to transfer, more efficiently transferred), while at the same time, tending to fragment more and over-penetrate less than a typical hollowpoint pistol bullet, which doesn’t reliably gain the velocity out of pistol-length barrels needed to reliably fragment.

Any of various “red-dot” sights (along with proper training, it must be said) on a AR-15 is going to enable these guards to accurately engage threats to 200 yards, far beyond the effective range of their pistols.

If the armed guard at Columbine who engaged Eric Harris had an AR-15 instead of just a pistol…

Sadly, it isn’t hard to anticipate the visceral response of anti-gun activists and those parents who simply don’t understand the capabilities of the platform.  Let’s hope that they have experts from the Gainesville Police on hand who are capable of explaining these advantages to concerned parents.

If they do a good enough job of explaining these advantages, expect for a few folks who were fearful of AR-15s from biased media coverage to revise their opinions.

After all, the AR-15 isn’t the most popular centerfire rifle in the United States without reason.