NRA: Schools all need guards

Group names Asa Hutchinson to head campus-security study

Asa Hutchinson said Friday that his “team of experts” will study “the best security solutions” for children at school, which could include armed volunteers acting as guards.

Asa Hutchinson said Friday that his “team of experts” will study “the best security solutions” for children at school, which could include armed volunteers acting as guards.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

— Seven days after the massacre of 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the National Rifle Association called Friday for the placement of armed guards in all of the nation’s roughly 100,000 schools.

The powerful pro-gun group said more watchmen with weapons are needed to increase school safety.

The NRA also named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas, to lead a study on school security.

The lobbying group introduced Hutchinson, a former Drug Enforcement Administration chief and high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official, during a news conference Friday.

Hutchinson called for the creation of cadres of armed volunteers to patrol school campuses.

“I took this assignment on one condition: that my team of experts will be independent and guided solely on what are the best security solutions for our children while they are at school,” he said.

After school massacres near Jonesboro in 1998, in Columbine, Colo., in 1999 and at Virginia Tech in 2007, gun-control supporters have urged more restrictions on firearms.

As Newtown continues to bury its dead, several congressmen are weighing in on new gun-control laws.

Some have warned that new laws are unnecessary and unconstitutional. Others say the focus should be on mental health, not new weapons restrictions.

A few, including Arkansas’ U.S. Rep. Mike Ross, a Democrat, say they’re rethinking their opposition to new gun control legislation.

After its initial silence, which the group said was out of respect for the dead, the NRA responded to the tragedy with an assertion that placing armed guards in schools is the best way to prevent future school rampages.

In a speech in which he blamed gun violence on the media and violent video games, Wayne LaPierre, the association’s executive vice president, called upon Congress to pass legislation that would pay to put police officers in every school in the nation.

He said his organization would spend “whatever the task requires” to fund the group Hutchinson would lead, which he called The National School Shield.

LaPierre accused critics of trying “to exploit tragedy for political gain.”

Some of the deadliest school shootings in the U.S. (AP)

  • Dec. 14, 2012: 20-year-old Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where he killed 20 children and six adults with a high-power rifle before taking his own life. The investigation revealed that Lanza had also killed his mother shortly before the shooting at the school.
  • April 2, 2012: A gunman killed seven people in a rampage at a California Christian university. Jongjin Kim, the Oikos University, said the suspect, One Goh, was angry because administrators refused to grant him a full tuition refund after he dropped out of the nursing program.
  • Feb. 27, 2012: Three students were killed and two wounded in a shooting spree that started in a school cafeteria in Chardon, Ohio, as students waited for buses to other schools. Police have charged T.J. Lane, who was 17 at the time, as an adult.
  • Feb. 14, 2008: Former student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., fatally shooting five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.
  • April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, fatally shot 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, then killed himself.
  • Oct. 2, 2006: Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, shot to death five girls at West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, then killed himself.
  • March 21, 2005: Jeffrey Weise, 16, shot and killed five schoolmates, a teacher and an unarmed guard at a high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota before taking his own life. Weise had earlier killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion.
  • Oct. 28, 2002: Robert Flores Jr., 41, who was flunking out of the University of Arizona nursing school, shot and killed three of his professors before killing himself.
  • March 5, 2001: Charles “Andy” Williams, 15, killed two fellow students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.
  • April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.
  • May 21, 1998: Two teenagers were killed and more than 20 people hurt when Kip Kinkel, 17, opened fire at a high school in Springfield, Ore., after killing his parents.
  • March 24, 1998: Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, killed four girls and a teacher at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school. Ten others were wounded in the shooting.
  • Dec. 1, 1997: Three students were killed and five wounded at a high school in West Paducah, Ky. Michael Carneal, then 14, later pleaded guilty but mentally ill to murder and is serving life in prison.
  • Oct. 1, 1997: Luke Woodham, 16, of Pearl, Miss., fatally shot two students and wounded seven others after stabbing his mother to death. He was sentenced the following year to three life sentences.

“Politicians pass laws for gun-free school zones,” LaPierre said. “They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them, and in doing so, they tell every insane killer that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”

Hutchinson said he would develop a plan for the NRA and begin recruiting security experts over the next week as he works to develop a school safety strategy.

He said the use of armed volunteers would eliminate the need for “massive” federal or state funding to pay for more school guards. In addition to guards, he envisioned an increase in the use of surveillance cameras and “biometric” identification devices (such as retina scans) in schools.

Hutchinson said the Watch Dog Dads of Bentonville, Ark., a group that seeks to provide positive role models for youths, illustrates how volunteers in a community can help students on campus while also keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior.

Armed and unarmed volunteers can identify strangers on campus and be trained on what to do in an emergency.

“Whether they are retired police, retired military or rescue personnel, I think there are people in every community of this country who would be happy to serve if only someone asked them, and gave them training and certification to do so,” Hutchinson told reporters Friday. “The National Rifle Association is the natural, obvious choice.”

The NRA sells a catalog of training materials, and athletic apparel and tote bags for teachers and students, LaPierre said, and the organization is poised to provide firearm training to help secure the nations estimated 98,817 public schools.

“Our training programs are the most advanced in the world,” LaPierre said.

In addition to its training and gun-safety programs, the NRA is a political powerhouse that claims 4 million members. In the political cycle that ended in November, organizations associated with the group - the NRA Institute for Legislative Action and the NRA political action committee - spent more than $18 million to support candidates and political issues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington group that tracks money in politics.

In an interview, Hutchinson avoided questions about possible gun-control legislation.

“My responsibility is not to engage in that side of the debate,” he said.

Hutchinson, who has been mentioned as a possible Republican contender in the 2014 Arkansas gubernatorial race, said his new assignment “has no long-term impact on any decision I might make in that regard.”

Hutchinson, who runs a law firm and security consulting business in Rogers, Ark., ran unsuccessfully for Arkansas governor in 2006.

About 200 print and broadcast journalists attended Friday’s NRA news conference in the tony Willard Intercontinental, a hotel one block from the White House.

LaPierre said society has left children defenseless.

“The monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it. That must change now. The truth is ....”

At that point a man stood up in front of the assembled journalists and unfurled a red banner that read “NRA Killing Our Kids.”

The man shouted: “We’ve got to end the violence, We’ve got to stop the killing.”

Three men in suits with NRA lapel pins grabbed the man and carried him out of the room as he yelled, “They are the perpetrators of the crimes that are taking place in our schools and in our streets.”

As the ruckus continued outside of the hotel ballroom, LaPierre did not acknowledge the interruption and picked up exactly where he left off, with a call for a national database of the mentally ill.

“The truth is our society is populated with an unknown number of genuine monsters,” he said.

In opening and closing the event, NRA President David Keene said his organization wants to be part of the “conversation” on school violence. As he and LaPierre left the stage, Keene did not respond to questions shouted by journalists.

“We will not be taking questions,” he said.

An Arkansas teacher’s union official rejected the gun group’s plan for armed school patrols.

Schools would be safer if they could hire more social workers and counselors, said Donna Morey of Little Rock, the president of the Arkansas Education Association.

“We don’t think more guns in schools is the answer,” she said in a telephone interview.

As Hutchinson and the NRA prepare to address school security, members of Congress are readying gun-related legislation to be introduced in January during the next session of Congress.

Arkansas’ Ross, who announced his retirement from the House this year and will not be part of that debate, has long prided himself on his “A” rating from the NRA.

In 2009, Ross led 65 other pro-gun-rights Democrats who pressed Attorney General Eric Holder not to reinstate a ban on assault weapons.

Two years later, he authored legislation, which did not make it out of committee, that would have relaxed gun ownership laws in Washington, D.C.

But since the massacre in Connecticut, Ross, who is co-chairman of the House Sportsmen’s Caucus, said he is now open to further restrictions on gun ownership, including a ban on high-capacity machine guns.

Since he was elected in 2000, Ross said the attitude among gun proponents was that if anti-gun groups “get a foot in the door, that means they’re going to go after everything, and your hunting rifle is next.”

“It’s time to move beyond that,” he said. “It’s time for both sides of the gun issue to put down the talking points and the hyped-up rhetoric and have an honest conversation.”

Other members of the Arkansas delegation said increasing gun restrictions could violate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which sets forth the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

Rep. Rick Crawford, a Jonesboro Republican, said the Connecticut killings were a “sensitive issue” in his district because of the 1998 killings of four students and one teacher at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro.

He said he fears that last week’s school rampage will result in “knee-jerk” reactions among lawmakers to write new laws.

“We already have a lot of gun laws on the books, and it appears that we’re not rigidly enforcing them,” he said.

Crawford said his view is informed by his wife, Stacy, who used to be a social worker in Jonesboro’s schools. He said the key to preventing gun violence is to identify at-risk students and make sure they don’t “fall through the cracks.”

Ross agreed that improving mental-health diagnosis and treatment is important. But, he said, the Sandy Hook school killings broke his heart. He said he has changed his mind about gun control and has decided that new gun restrictions are necessary.

“This is not the same America I grew up with,” he said. “I wish it was.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/22/2012