NRA’S study backs arms in schools

Washington – A 225-page study commissioned by the National Rifle Association has endorsed and amplified the gun rights group’s immediate response to the mass killing in Newtown, Connecticut that all schools in the United States should have police or armed staff members trained to confront a shooter.

Although ostensibly independent of the NRA, the examination of school safety issues, released yesterday, provides the organisation with an alternative narrative to the various gun-control measures in Congress that it is opposing or seeking to dilute.

The National School Shield Report focuses on a host of possible safety measures, such as internal door security and perimeter fencing, but its central recommendation is that armed personnel should be posted in all schools.

Former congressman Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, who led the US$1 million (NZ$1.19m) study, said that schools could use ‘‘school resource officers’’ – typically local police trained to work in schools – or arm teachers or administrators designated by school boards or superintendents. Those staff members should receive 40 to 60 hours of weapons instruction and other training, the report recommends.

The NRA said it needed time ‘‘to digest the full report’’ but believed it would go a long way to making America’s schools safer.

Hutchinson said that armed school personnel could reduce death tolls in shootings. He pointed to a 1997 incident at a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, in which an assistant principal was able to get a .45 semi-automatic pistol from his truck and detain a 16-year-old student who had killed two students and wounded others.

‘‘The key is reducing that response time,’’ Hutchinson said.

The proposal has drawn a mixed reaction from school districts, and critics have argued that putting armed personnel in schools would increase the risk of shootings. ‘‘The report is nothing more than a continuation of the NRA’s attempts to prey on America’s fears, saturate our schools with more guns and turn them into armed fortresses,’’ Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defence Fund, said. ‘‘It must be soundly rejected.’’

The report does not provide specific recommendations for the ratio of armed personnel to pupils or what kind of guns school personnel should carry.

Hutchinson said those were local decisions, but weapons could include handguns, shotguns or semi-automatic rifles. Many smaller school districts could not afford school resource officers and their only option was to train existing staff in how to respond to a shooter, he said.

Mark Mattioli, whose 6-year-old son, James, was killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in December, appeared alongside Hutchinson at a news conference and said he applauded the report’s recommendations.

‘‘I’m putting it on you, I’m putting it on the experts out there to do something with these recommendations, to implement solutions, so people don’t have to go through what I’m going through,’’ Mattioli said.

Hutchinson declined to be drawn on the merits of particular elements of current gun control legislation, but said the measure just approved by the state of Connecticut, which extends its ban on assault weapons and imposes registration requirements for high-capacity magazines, would do nothing for school safety. ‘‘I would say it’s totally inadequate,’’ he said.

Banning certain kinds of weapons would not stop a shooter from entering a school with another kind of gun. ‘‘You can add assault weapons and it doesn’t stop . . . violence in the schools.’’

Representative Elijah Cummings, a Democrat, who is sponsoring a federal gun-trafficking bill, said he was sceptical about armed guards in schools.

‘‘Having more guns in schools, I don’t think, is necessarily the answer,’’ he said. ‘‘But any jurisdiction that wants to take care of their kids in that way, I think that may not be a bad proposal. But keep in mind that gun violence is not restricted to schools.’’