URBAN PERSPECTIVE-Consider this. The Bureau of Statistics did a ten year study from 2002 to 2011 of mass shootings in America. It found that less than one-fifth of one percent of all shootings in the country involved four or more victims.
Let’s fine tune this more. Noted criminologist James Alan Fox crunched the numbers on shootings on all school campuses in the nation and found that less than one percent of all shootings involved multiple victims.
Let’s fine tune the numbers even more, the Centers for Disease Control in two separate reports on K-12 school shootings found that the chance of a child dying in school in any given year from a homicide or suicide was less than 1 in 1 million in the early 1990s and 1 in two million in the latter 1990s.
This probability has remained unchanged in the decade since. These numbers and percentages tell one glaring fact. Despite the horror, hysteria, and media sensationalism over the Newtown and Columbine massacres, mass shoot ups of America’s schools are not just rare, but rarer than ever.
Now consider this. There has been no reported mass shooting at any school in any predominantly black or Hispanic neighborhood in the country ever.
Now consider this even more. A federal judge in Maryland in a ruling in a suit brought by gun rights groups to overturn Maryland’s ban on assault weapons has bluntly said that assault weapons cause more injuries and fatalities when they are used. She specifically cited AR-15s as the most lethal of these weapons. She made no distinction about whose hands they were in, criminals or law enforcement. They are still weapons of mass killing.
She further noted that the weapons pose an even deadlier risk to law enforcement because of their enhanced penetrating capabilities.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that an AR-15 poses a grave threat to all who handle or come within its striking range, the Compton school board barged ahead in July and voted unanimously to allow its school police to arm themselves with these weapons of mass killings.
They tore a page straight out of the playbook the NRA has used to beat back any congressional effort to ban assault weapons and claimed that they give cops a weapon to take out the bad guy presumably faster and more permanent in a shoot-out on a school campus.
This mythical, self-serving, and farcical rationale has served the NRA well. But for a small town police force patrolling predominantly low income black and brown schools where the prospect of a Newtown type school massacre is nil is beyond ludicrous. It is horrific.
Just weeks after the board made its disastrous decision, the nation watched in disgust as hundreds of police packing war zone weapons, tanks and body armor intimidated, harassed, and even brutalized peaceful demonstrators and reporters in Ferguson, Missouri following the gunning down of Michael Brown by a white cop.
The heavy handed, overkill by the poorly trained, wanna be GI Joes, prompted President Obama and even the Pentagon to promise to review the military’s wholesale giveaway of a dizzying array of tanks, body armor, and assault weapons to big and small city police department. Obama was rightly aghast that the gobbling up by police departments of weapons of mass destruction had gotten way out of hand and the nation had taken a dangerous step toward the establishment of a full blown national security state that posed a mortal threat to the lives and constitutional rights of Americans.
Obama also noted that the review would determine whether police departments were given proper training in the use of any of these weapons.
Compton school police officials insist that their officers will be well-trained in the use of their assault weapons. But this misses the point. Assault weapons are designed for combat, and they are designed to spray a field of battle wreaking mass carnage against the ranks of enemy soldiers.
Opening up on a mythical shooter in a grade school, would cause the same mass carnage. The difference is the victims would not be battleground enemy soldiers, but 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders.
Compton school officials haven’t said how they would avoid that carnage.
It’s true that the LAUSD and a handful of other local school police agencies also sport AR-15s but they shouldn’t have them either for the same deadly reasons. But Compton is the worst case of all given the towering needs of an impoverished grossly underfunded, and under achieving predominantly black and Hispanic school district.
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In ordering his review of the military weapons programs, Obama said “there is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement and we don’t want to blur those lines.”
The Compton school board meets again the first week of September. It should immediately rescind its wasteful, dangerous and ridiculous authorization for these weapons. If it doesn’t it does more than blur that line. It will send the horrific message that weapons of mass destruction have a place at their schools.
(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is President of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 69
Pub: Aug 26, 2014
