A prosecutor in Lapeer, Michigan says, “No harm, no foul,” after a charter school took the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) advice and hired a armed security guard who promptly left his handgun unattended in a student bathroom.
Chatfield School co-directors Matt Young and Bill Kraly announced last week that they had hired retired Lapeer County Sheriff’s Dept. firearms instructor Clark Arnold as a security guard in response to the December mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
“It’s a tremendous asset to the safety of our students,” Young told WNEM in a report that aired on Tuesday.
But by Wednesday, the school had admitted to The Flint Journal that the retired firearms instructor had made a “made a breach in security protocol” and left his unloaded handgun unattended in the school restroom “for a few moments.”
“The school has put additional security procedures in place that follow local law enforcement practices and guidelines,” a statement from Young said. “At no time was any student involved in this breach of protocol. We will continue to work on improving school security.”
Lapeer County Prosecutor Byron Konschuh displayed a marked lack of logic in response to the incident. “If you left a gun unattended and a toddler finds it and shoots and hurts someone, it could be some kind of reckless use of a firearm,” he said. But since no kids got a hold of it, it was “almost like no harm no foul.” So, if you leave a gun laying around and a kid doesn’t find it before you remember where you left it, that’s completely responsible use of a firearm. Apparently, luck is an important factor in responsible firearms use.
But here’s the thing; Arnold was a trained firearms instructor. You assume he knew what he was doing. This just points to the fact that we’re all human and humans make mistakes. But when firearms are involved in these perfectly human mistakes, the consequence have the potential of turning a lot more serious and deadly. Bringing a gun into any situation increases the danger of that situation, simply by virtue of the presence of the gun and the fact that it’s in the possession of an eminently fallible human being. This is one reason why having a gun in your house makes you more likely to be shot, not less — the less often you’re in the presence of a gun, the less often you’re exposed to the danger of a deadly mistake. It simply makes perfect sense.
And people want to bring the danger of that deadly mistake into our schools? Seems less like a common sense safety measure and more an obvious recipe for disaster. As safety measures go, guns are terrible.
