Indiana School Board Unanimously Passes "Guns In Schools" Policy

An Indiana school board has voted 7-0 to allow school administrators and school board members who undergo specific training and uses specific equipment to carry firearms inside campus buildings. It’s a heck of a win for the data-driven approach to combating school violence:

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Administrators and school board members with the North White School Corporation can carry guns inside campus buildings beginning in July.

The North White Board of Trustees voted unanimously, 7-0, to approve the new policy on Monday. According to North White School Board President Shannon Mattix, the policy states guns may be carried inside campus buildings while school is in session and at school events.

Participants must pass two annual training sessions, one six hour basic firearm training session, and up to 40 hours of crisis management and defensive tactics training. Those carrying guns are required to go through a psychological evaluation at least once a year.

Other policy requirements include the firearm must be concealed, semi-automatic, held in a Level Two or Three holster, and carried not stored in the building.

The training requirements, holster requirements, and firearms requirements all seem quite reasonable, but I’m not sure that arming school board members accomplishes anything at all for students during the course of a school day.

I’ll be interested to see if they decide to expand the policy after implementation, based upon data from Purdue University’s Homeland Security Institute, which is in the process of publishing their new data on the most effective ways to stop a school shooter.

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The control scenario was just a school with locked doors and no resource officers or staff with concealed carry permits. The researchers found that the control scenario had the most casualties and the longest response time. Their model showed that the response time would be 10-12 minutes and an average of 20 casualties. Their model used historical active shooter data to arrive at this.

When a school resource officer is introduced to the scenario, response times dropped to a quarter of the original times and casualties were reduced by two-thirds.

The scenario involving concealed carry in the school had rather conservative parameters. Only 5-10% of the staff and administration carried concealed and those holders sheltered in place with their students. They only engaged the threat when the shooter came into the room in which they were sheltered. In other words, they were not roaming the school actively searching out the shooter. The Homeland Security Institute found that adding concealed carry holders to the mix reduced both response times and casualties the most of any scenario tested. As Dr. Dietz charactered [sic] it, more friendly guns in a firefight is a good thing.

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When anti-gunners attempt to frame the issue of teachers and administrators carrying in schools, they whip up the strawman of an untrained doddering old spinster wielding some sort of hand-cannon, scared of her own shadow, blasting away at students, her fellow teachers, and responding police as she attempts to “clear” the school.

That is not at all what any of the adults in the room are discussing.

Trained, armed faculty and staff  in barricaded classrooms are a nightmare for anyone attempting to force their way through the “fatal funnel” of the doorway into a classroom. It’s good that some data-driven administrators have been able to get beyond the emotionalism to focus on intelligent solutions.

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