AN INVITATION FOR VIOLENCE? OR A PROVEN DETERRENT?
Three decades ago, the law confronted a very different threat
WASHINGTON – President Trump has mocked the idea of a “gun-free” school zone in the weeks since a Florida rampage, saying schools should be heavily guarded and fortified and teachers should carry concealed guns, air marshal-style.
“You have a gun-free zone, it’s like an invitation for these very sick people to go there,” Trump said at a gathering of governors at the White House.
A gun-free zone “is like target practice” for people like Nikolas Cruz, the accused shooter at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Trump told an interviewer. “They see that and that’s what they want. Gun-free zones are very dangerous. The bad guys love gun-free zones.”
But nearly 30 years before the bloodshed Feb. 14 and nearly a decade before the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, gun-free schools
“That’s what they want. ... The bad guys love gun-free zones.” President Trump
were considered a major legislative victory, a solution to a different kind of gun violence.
“He is just utterly missing the point of the law,” said Victoria Bassetti, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who was Senate Judiciary Committee counsel under Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., when Congress approved the GunFree School Zones Act of 1990.
The law, she said, was meant to combat “the very serious danger posed by a variety of criminal actors around schools and involving guns.” That included gangs, drug dealers “and other dangerous characters.”
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, pointed out that “gun-free” doesn’t mean police in schools can’t be armed. Just the opposite: “Police are allowed to have guns in schools. They’re sworn officers.”
At the time the law was passed, Bassetti said, schools had a very different gun problem from the one we’re discussing after Parkland: Students were bringing guns to school in jawdropping numbers and shooting one another in targeted, not random, attacks. One 2003 analysis found that from 1990 to 1999, 84% of the 90 school gunmen identified by researchers killed just one person.
In the late 1980s, Bassetti recalled, a string of gang-related school shootings “sort of drew attention to the problem of guns in schools” and led to a systematic analysis of how firearms ended up there. “It was clear that there was a pervasive problem,” mostly in urban schools.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had recently found that an eye-popping 135,000 guns were brought to school each day. Other research found that about one in five urban high school students reported having a gun fired at them at school.
“It wasn’t the suicidal or the homicidal kid who just decides to shoot everything up. It was the problem of bullying or gang violence or surrounding drug violence — or drug dealing — going on around schools,” she said. “Gangs and drugs mean guns, and the idea was that we have to get guns out of this equation.”
She added: “It’s hard to fix the gang problem. It’s very hard to fix the drug problem. It’s very much easier to fix the gun problem, so we went for the straightforward solution: No guns in schools.”
Neil Quinter, an attorney in Washington, D.C., former member of the Maryland House of Delegates and one-time chief counsel to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who has long pushed for tougher gun regulations, noted that the law called for enhanced penalties — five years of extra prison time and a substantial fine — for carrying a gun near a school in a gun-free zone.
The Supreme Court struck down the law in 1995 as unconstitutional because it criminalized possessing an otherwise legal gun simply because the user was near a school. Lawmakers later revised the law to specify that the gun in question had to have been purchased via, or somehow involved in, interstate commerce.
A House Appropriations Committee amendment in 1996 effectively blocked the CDC from researching gun violence prevention, so little research exists on how effective gun-free zones actually were.
But CDC statistics show that school-associated violent deaths dropped from 57 in the 1992-93 school year to 33 in 2009-10.
A 2017 report on school safety by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics found that the number of crimes against students has plummeted more than 80% since 1992. The rate of victimization for students in U.S. middle schools and high schools dropped from about 182 incidents per 1,000 students to just 30 in 2013.
Nearly 30 years later, the original legislation has given rise to new versions in places that still suffer from high crime and gang activity.
Cami Anderson, the former superintendent of Newark Public Schools from 2011 to 2015, said a “safe corridor” program, which enlisted school and city police to keep guns away from schools, has had a huge influence.
In five years leading Newark schools, Anderson said she had no significant issues with guns on campus.
“It did help — you felt (it) palpably, when you went into our high schools after we implemented a lot of these systems. From the very beginning of the day, folks were in there and ready to learn.”