Editorial: Gun lobby, don't change the subject

The NRA's Wayne LaPierre makes it sound so simple: Hire armed guards for every school in America, and the nation can stop shootings like this month's horrific massacre in Newtown, Conn.

If only it were that easy.

The National Rifle Association's transparent tactic is to deflect serious debate about guns by insisting that more weapons, not fewer, would solve the nation's problem with gun violence. But more guns is a large part of what makes the U.S. so dangerous already.

This nation has about the same rate of mental illness as other nations, for example, and the same sort of violent movies, TV shows and video games. But it has far more gun violence. Why? The major difference is that the U.S. is awash in firearms — roughly 300 million of them in private hands — while other nations severely restrict availability.

That said, confiscating guns from Americans who lawfully own them is a non-starter. The Supreme Court has twice ruled that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to own weapons, which ends the fantasy of ardent gun restrictionists. The court has left the door open for safety-related restrictions, which presumably allows bans on assault weapons and large magazines. But unless Americans voluntarily relinquish their vast armory, which is beyond unlikely, reasonable policy also has to look elsewhere.

And, in that context, armed guards at schools makes some sense. It's certainly a better idea than arming teachers, which could frighten students and create more problems than it would solve. It's doubtful most teachers would want to carry guns, and doubtful that most parents would be comfortable with the idea of armed educators of uncertain training, expertise and temperament.

Far better, if guns are to be in schools, for them to be in the hands of a small group of highly trained and qualified guards, if only as a last line of defense. It's conceivable that such a person might have been able to stop Adam Lanza before he murdered 20 first-graders. Or, just as conceivably, an armed guard might have been the first victim of Lanza's vastly superior firepower.

Roughly one-fourth of the nation's public schools already have armed guards, so this isn't a new or untested idea. Schools shouldn't be forced to accept gun-carrying security, but if local boards of education want it, that's their prerogative.

LaPierre, the NRA's executive director, banned questions at last week's so-called news conference where he outlined his school-safety plan. But if he had allowed any, here are a few that come to mind:

• Where do you find trained, effective armed guards for the nation's nearly 100,000 public schools?
• How do you screen out guards who might make schools more dangerous, not less?
• How do you finance the multibillion dollar annual cost (beyond LaPierre's flip suggestion that the money come from foreign aid, the go-to source of every ill-informed budget cutter)?
• If armed guards are such an obvious solution, why did one fail to stop the slaughter at Columbine High School in 1999?
• And if posting armed guards at schools makes so much sense, shouldn't you also station them at churches, shopping malls, movie theaters and all the other public places where deranged shooters have gone to kill people?

This shouldn't be the end of the debate over what to do about guns in America, as the gun lobby would clearly prefer. If anything good is to come from the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary, it's that Americans have started a serious discussion about how to begin reducing the nation's awful rate of gun violence.

That would be a fitting memorial to the victims, and one that extends far beyond putting armed guards in the nation's schools.