High School Students Launching National Movement Have Potent Political Tool At Fingertips – Voting

High school students who are launching a national movement in response to Florida and other school shootings have more political tools at their disposal than they may realize.

They may not be able to vote yet, but they can put themselves in a position to do so. In most states, young people who will turn 18 before the next general election can register to vote, at a minimum, when they are 17.

That means, the vast majority of high school seniors can register now and vote in the next election. In many states, including California and Florida, where the most recent mass school shooting occurred, students can pre-register when they are 16 and be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18. As of the beginning of 2018, approximately 41,000 young people in California had taken advantage of the option to pre-register. That number is a fraction of the number who are eligible.

Pre-registration for 16 year olds is also available in Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island and Utah.

Voter registration typically declines in years when there is not a presidential election. This year is no exception. In California, there are approximately 450,000 fewer registered voters now than there were at the start of 2017. Many other states have also seen net decreases in registration in the past year.

Some states, including California, are starting to use “automatic” voter registration, in which an eligible person will be automatically registered to vote when they obtain a driver's license or state ID card at the Department of Motor Vehicles. An opt-out option will be available, but this is not the default.

As helpful and overdue as such a system is, it is unlikely to lead to substantially higher youth registration in the midterm elections without other efforts. Fewer young people are obtaining driver's licenses than in the past, and most of the 6 million eligible people in California who are not registered will not be interacting with the DMV between April, when the new system starts, and election day.

California has also designated the last two weeks of April as official High School Voter Education Weeks. Broward County, Florida has held annual high school voter registration drives in May. But the number of schools that actually succeed in making sure all or most of their students are registered to vote before graduation is discouragingly small. Often schools do not even teach young people that they can register or pre-register to vote before they turn 18.

If civics education means anything, it means teaching young people that they have the right and ability to organize and the right and ability to register or pre-register to vote, so they can have a voice in their future. High school students and everyone who cares about them have the tools they need to make this happen today.

The Teacher and Her Gun: Shots Fired in the Sanctuary

In the aftermath of yet another tragic school shooting, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida., on Feb. 14, where 17 people were killed and 15 others were wounded, our collective anguish and outrage has led yet again to strident calls for the implementation of meaningful reforms to avert future tragedies, i.e. the next school shooting. According to the Washington Post, “more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999,” and that “On average, two dozen children are shot every day in the United States, and in 2016 more youths were killed by gunfire — 1,637 — than during any previous year this millennium.” The clarion call and the mandate to action, particularly given the ardent activism of the surviving high school students from Parkland, has never been more driven and focused.

One profoundly wrong-headed, dangerous, and ill-conceived, (the term “knee-jerk” comes immediately to mind), recommended approach to the issue of guns and shootings in schools advocates for the arming of teachers, in effect “deputizing” them as the front-line troops in the battle against the heavily armed men and boys who commit the vast majority of school shootings in the United States. (Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 staff and students in Parkland with his legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle, is a 19-year-old). By this inane logic, we ought also to arm theatre ushers, nightclub bouncers and bartenders, and performance artists. We would thus avoid the mass shootings and carnage that have taken place in movie theatres, nightclubs, and concert venues.

I have carried a firearm for most of my adult life; in an earlier career I was a police lieutenant. I have not held a gun in my hands since I left law enforcement for an academic career over a dozen years ago and, given that I teach 50 freshman students this semester who are all 18 or 19 years old, I might qualify as a teacher, albeit not of the high school pedigree. And I see no place for guns in the hands of those who, like me, occupy the privileged position of educating young people. Standing before students in a classroom with a gun is a degradation of the pedagogic relationship between teachers and students, casting suspicion and mistrust among classroom participants and thrusting the teacher into the unwelcome and unsolicited role of enforcer, sentinel, warrior.

Writing about school shootings and school-related violence, Aislinn O’Donnell is concerned  with what she calls the “securitization” of education, the move toward an environment characterized by “control,” “behavioral management strategies,” the “suspension and expulsion of students for minor infractions,” “punitive responses…that criminalize children,” “fortification of the site of the school,” and “practices of risk management that can increase risk.” Arming teachers will contribute to this “securitization” of our schools in ways that are inimical to the culture of learning, trust, respect, and nurturance that are characteristic of American classrooms. The call to have teachers carry guns in classrooms poses a short-sighted and uninformed surrender to the current zeitgeist of ignorance, impulse, and turpitude that characterizes much of what presently imposes itself on our fractured public discourse, a discourse that has deteriorated to a point where there are those who actually believe that giving guns to school teachers makes sense.

The President of the National Education Association, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, believes that “Bringing more guns into our schools does nothing to protect our students and educators from gun violence, Educators need to be focused on teaching our students. We need solutions that will keep guns out of the hands of those who want to use them to massacre innocent children and educators. Arming teachers does nothing to prevent that.”

The objections to this thoughtless and foolish proposal are many, but the primary and most vocal objections lie rightfully in the consequential and perhaps irreversible damage that armed teachers in classrooms pose for our system of education in the United States. Teachers with guns impress upon our children and young people that they are not safe in school; that potential intruders and murderers are constantly lurking in the hallways and classrooms; that everyone is potentially suspect, and that schools are always and already places fraught with peril, violence, and calamity. Teachers with guns convey the tacit message that schools are not sanctuaries where stimulation, growth, knowledge, and wonder are experienced and acquired, but rather dispiriting and cheerless places marked with the tension, anxiety, mistrust, suspicion, and dread that are characteristic of other potential locations of conflict, confrontation, and armed engagement.

And where there are guns, there will be mishaps, accidents, injuries, and yes, the deaths of innocents. In floating the proposal to have our teachers carry guns while they are teaching their students (something that I can’t believe that I just actually typed), we are asking of them the impossible and placing them squarely in the crosshairs of a position that is at once untenable and potentially deadly, with a very slim chance for a successful outcome should a genuine threat emerge.

The vacuity and inanity of this proposal derail the narrative from what should be its proper target: the guns, and particularly the military assault rifles that are far too often found in the hands of those least suitable to be in their possession. Until and unless our political leaders attain the fortitude necessary to enact meaningful legislation that significantly restricts the availability and acquisition of firearms, and particularly military-grade assault rifles, we are doomed to revisit the topic yet again, after the next mass shooting. Of potential remedies for this uniquely American scourge, arming teachers should not be given even remote consideration. Most teachers would no doubt agree.

“And The Children Shall Lead Us” – Birmingham 1963 and Parkland 2018

Battered, bruised and demoralized – literally and figuratively – by an unsuccessful two-year campaign to desegregate Albany, Georgia, a small southwestern town near the Alabama border, the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) convened in January 1963 to assess its mistakes and plan a way forward. Frustrated by Albany Police Chief Leslie Pritchett’s clever response to the Albany campaign – he never publicly used violent tactics to arrest demonstrators – Martin Luther King, Jr. needed a success to recover the momentum in the civil rights movement that had stalled by December 1962. The prominent African American journalist Louis Lomax observed that King’s public image as a flawless strategist had taken a serious hit. “The next town he visits,” Lomax wrote, “to inspire those who are ready to suffer for their rights, he will find people saying, ‘Remember Albany.’”

Among the SCLC ministers gathered in Dorchester, Georgia was Fred Shuttlesworth.

Born in south Alabama, Shuttlesworth had taken the pulpit of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953, and quickly made clear he would shrink from no challenge or personal threat to his safety to push for desegregation. In 1956, after Alabama had outlawed the NAACP on the grounds that it operated in violation of criminal law to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott and obtain the admission of Autherine Lucy to the University of Alabama in February 1956 – it did neither, by the way – Shuttlesworth co-founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACHR) to fill the void. Shuttlesworth told his colleagues that it was time to bring the movement to Birmingham, the largest city in Alabama, and one whose population was forty percent black and teeming with racial tension. Shuttlesworth had left Birmingham for Cincinnati in 1961, somewhat frustrated with what he viewed as a preference for “flowery speeches” over direct action to challenge Jim Crow. But in January 1963 he believed Birmingham was ripe for what he called “Project C” – for Project Confrontation. The SCLC agreed to move its next major operation to Birmingham.

By April, demonstrations had taken on a constant rhythm. King’s willingness to lead by example resulted in his arrest on Good Friday. He was placed in solitary confinement, where he would pen, on scraps of paper smuggled out by his friend and SCLC executive director Wyatt T. Walker, his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” King’s jailing had now become the major media story and the demonstrations directed against the entire downtown white business community had begun to flag. After his release on April 20, King assembled the SCLC leadership now ensconced in Birmingham to discuss how to put the protests back on track. James Bevel, a veteran of the successful 1960 spring sit-in campaign in Nashville, suggested that they recruit schoolchildren to flood the sidewalks, parks and streets of downtown Birmingham. Bevel knew full well that Birmingham was a more hostile environment than Nashville, and that using children carried a certain degree of risk. But he also knew from his work on the ground that black children understood the consequences of their parents’ decision to demonstrate – the loss of their jobs, the possible bombing of their homes and economic sanctions from local banks and businesses – and wanted to relieve them of the burden their actions carried. In Nashville, black college students culminated their efforts by marching to Mayor Ben West’s office and confronting him on the plaza leading into the municipal building. With reporters present and cameras rolling, Fisk University student and sit-in leader Diane Nash asked Mayor West if he believed, as a man and a Christian, that racial segregation was right. West responded that, no, he did not. It was a signal that the downtown Nashville business community had waited for, and a peaceful process of desegregation began.

Bevel argued to his reluctant colleagues that the image of seeing elementary and secondary school-age children being arrested and taken to jail would embarrass the local business community and jar the conscience of the small but growing number of moderate to liberal local whites who believed that the time had come to move forward. “Most adults have bills to pay – house notes, rents, car notes, utility bills, but young people . . . are not hooked with all those responsibilities,” said Bevel. “A boy from high school has the same effect in terms of being jail . . . as his father, and yet there’s no economic threat to the family, because the father is still on the job.” King was by then tied up in court proceedings, but had given his okay for Bevel to move forward with what soon became known as “The Children’s Crusade.”

On May 2, after a week-long crash course at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in non-violence resistance, over one thousand black schoolchildren, ranging in ages from six to eighteen, flooded the streets, parks and sidewalks of downtown Birmingham. Frustrated and angry over this new tactic, Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered the police to turn police dogs on the young demonstrators and commanded firefighters to blast them with fire hoses. The images of young children rolling down the street after being pummeled with water, clinging on to trees and benches in Kelly Ingram Park, located right across from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, were captured by reporters from national networks for everyone to see. In Washington, the Kennedy administration watched every moment of this horror and was forced to send Burke Marshall, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, back to Birmingham to broker a peace between the downtown white power structure and the demonstrators. By mid-May, the city’s business community and representatives of the SCLC announced an agreement to begin desegregating downtown stores and other public accommodations. The Children’s Crusade had been a considerable risk for the SCLC; but it correctly understood that children – innocent, hopeful and undeterred – had the power to poke the nation’s conscience in a way that adults talking past each other did not. After a difficult summer, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, ranging in ages from eleven to fourteen, would pay an even greater price when they lost their lives after members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church during Sunday morning church services on Sunday, September 15 of that same year.

I cannot for a moment even imagine what it must be like to have been a student, staffer or teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last week when a crazed AR-15 wielding coward named Nikolas Cruz murdered seventeen people, left even more wounded and scarred for life countless others who will live with this nightmare for the rest of their lives. But I cannot help but think back to the Children’s Crusade almost fifty-five years ago when schoolchildren threw caution and expectation to the wind and forced the nation to examine its conscience when I see the determination of the Douglas High students and the greater Parkland community to press leaders for change. No more meaningless “thoughts and prayers” from politicians; no more hypocritical calls to treat “warning signs” and “mental health” issues by a president who, among his very first acts in office, issued an executive order rescinding a mental health background check on people who want to buy guns; no more “that’s the price we pay for freedom” from lawmakers at all levels who take the NRA’s blood money without a trace of concern.

Earlier this week, high school students gathered at the White House for a “lie-in” to draw attention to their cause. Teenagers have taken to social media to organize a #NeverAgain movement to hold lawmakers and the president accountable. Parents have taken their primal screams of anger public and made clear that this time will be different. At some point, NRA apologists like Florida senator Marco Rubio will be not able to avoid his constituents and neither will the president. Just like Diane Nash on the plaza of the Mayor Ben West’s office, Stoneman Douglas students like Cameron Kasky, Jaclyn Corin, Sarah Chadwick and Emma “We Call B.S.” Gonzalez have shown their courage in standing up to elected power. Just like the children who courageously stood up to Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, students across the country understand that what Franklin D. Roosevelt called a basic civil right – the freedom from fear – is their right, not a privilege. And just like the children of a different time, these students ain’t gonna let no one turn them around.

*Photo credit: By Laurie Shaull (Own Work), Are You Next? We Call BS, student lie-in at the White House to protest gun laws [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/), via Flickr. 

Vance Muse and the Racist Origins of Right-to-Work

*This is part of ACSblog's Symposium on Janus v. AFSCME

The Right-to-Work movement is hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court in the upcoming Janus v. AFSCMEcase will invalidate closed shop arrangements among public employee unions. If the Court does so, it will cripple public employee unions and give Right-to-Work the greatest triumph in its seventy-seven year history. Although Right-to-Work forces will hail victory as a triumph for individual workers, an examination of the origins of Right-to-Work suggests that closed shop laws were intended to maintain Jim Crow labor relations and prevent workers from challenging the prerogatives of racist plantation owners and industrialists.

No one was more important in placing Right-to-Work on the conservatives’ political agenda than Vance Muse of the Christian American Association, a larger-than-life Texan whose own grandson described him as “a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.”[1]

The idea for modern Right-to-Work laws did not originate with Muse. Rather it came from Dallas Morning News’s William Ruggles, who on Labor Day 1941 published an editorial calling for the national prohibition on the closed shop. Muse visited Ruggles soon thereafter and secured the writer’s blessing for the Christian American Association to launch a campaign to outlaw contracts that required employees to belong to unions. Ruggles even suggested to Muse the name for such legislation—Right-to-Work.[2]

Muse had long made a lucrative living lobbying throughout the South on behalf of conservative and corporate interests or, in the words of one of his critics, “playing rich industrialists as suckers.” Over the course of his career, he fought women’s suffrage, worked to defeat the proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting child labor, lobbied for high tariffs, and sought repeal of the eight-hour workday law for railroaders.[3]

But Muse first attracted national attention through his work with the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, which sought to deny Roosevelt’s re-nomination in 1936 on grounds that the New Deal threatened the South’s racial order. Among Muse’s activities on behalf of the Southern Committee was the distribution of what Time called “cheap pamphlets containing blurred photographs of the Roosevelts consorting with Negroes” accompanied by “blatant text proclaiming them ardent Negrophiles.” Muse later defended the action and the use of its most provocative photograph: “I am a Southerner and for white supremacy . . . . It was a picture of Mrs. Roosevelt going to some nigger meeting with two escorts, niggers, on each arm.”[4]

In 1936, on the heels of the Southern Committee’s failure to deny Roosevelt’s nomination, Muse incorporated the Christian American Association to continue the fight against the New Deal, offering up a toxic mix of anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Communism, and anti-unionism. Muse and his allies considered the New Deal to be part of the broader assault of “Jewish Marxism” upon Christian free enterprise. The Christian American Association’s titular head, Lewis Valentine Ulrey, explained that after their success in Russia the “Talmudists” had set out to conquer the rest of the world and that they had succeeded in the United States with the enactment of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Vance Muse voiced the same anti-Semitic ideas in much simpler terms: “That crazy man in the White House will Sovietize American with the federal hand-outs of the Bum Deal—sorry, New Deal. Or is it the Jew Deal?”[5]

By the early 1940s, Muse and his Christian American Association allies, like many southern conservatives, focused their wrath on the labor movement, especially the unions associated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations that were organizing sharecroppers and challenging the legal underpinnings of white supremacy. The Christian American Association solicited wealthy southern planters and industrialists for funds to help break the “strangle hold radical labor has on our government” through the enactment of anti-union laws. The Christian American Association warned that the CIO—which had become shorthand for Jewish Marxist unions—was sending organizers to the rural South to inflame the contented but gullible African-American population as the first step in a plot to Sovietize the nation.[6]

Muse and the Christian Americans initially had little luck selling their Right-to-Work amendment but did have success peddling a pre-packaged anti-strike law to cotton plantation owners and industrialists first in Texas and then later in Mississippi and Arkansas. This law made strikers, but not strikebreakers or management, criminally liable for any violence that occurred on the picket line. For a fee, Muse and his organization would lobby legislators and mobilize public support through newspaper advertisements, direct mail campaigns, and a speakers’ bureau. In Arkansas, Muse and the Christian Americans portrayed the anti-strike measure as a means to allow “peace officers to quell disturbances and keep the color line drawn in our social affairs” and promised that it would “protect the Southern Negro from communistic propaganda and influences.”[7]

The planter-controlled Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation and allied industrialists were so pleased with the Christian American Association’s success in passing the anti-strike measure that they agreed to underwrite a campaign in 1944 to secure a Right-to-Work amendment for the Arkansas constitution.  This placed Arkansas alongside Florida and California as the first states where voters could cast ballots for Right-to-Work laws. While Muse and the Christian Americans helped with the campaigns in California and Florida, they led the one in Arkansas.[8]

During the Arkansas campaign, the Christian Americans insisted that Right-to-Work was essential for the maintenance of the color line. One piece of literature warned that if the amendment failed “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes . . . whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” Similarly, the Arkansas Farm Bureau justified its support of Right-to-Work by citing organized labor’s threat to the Jim Crow order. It accused the CIO of “trying to pit . . .  black against white.”[9]

In November 1944, Arkansas and Florida became the first states to enact Right-to-Work laws (California voters rejected the measure). In the wake of the Arkansas victory, Muse half-heartedly denied the racist and anti-Semitic origins of Right-to-Work: “They call me anti-Jew and anti-nigger. Listen we like the nigger—in his place . . . . Our [Right-to-Work] amendment helps the nigger; it does not discriminate against him.  Good niggers, not those Communist niggers. Jews? Why some of my best friends are Jews. Good Jews.”[10]

It is not coincidental that Right-to-Work first took root in the Jim Crow South. In those states, few blacks could cast free ballots, poll taxes prevented most working-class whites from voting, election fraud was rampant, and political power was concentrated in the hands of an elite. Right-to-Work laws sought to make it stay that way, to deprive the least powerful of a voice, and to make sure that workers remained divided along racial lines. It would be an incredible irony if, in the name of worker rights, the Supreme Court incorporates Right-to-Work into the U.S. Constitution.

 

[1] Vance Muse [III], “Making Peace with Grandfather,” Texas Monthly (February 1986): 116.

[2] George N. Green, “Establishing the Texas Far Right, 1940-1960,” in The Texas Right: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Conservatism, ed. David O’Donald and Kyle G. Wilkison (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2014), 90-91;  Cheryl Hall, “DMN Writer Coined term ‘Right to Work,’ Opposed Forced Union Membership,” Dallas Morning News, July 12, 2010, www.dallasnews.com (accessed July 6, 2016); “William Ruggle’s Labor Day editorial on the Right to Work,” National Institute for Labor Relations Research, www.nilrr.org (accessed July 6, 2016).

[3] Walter Davenport, “Savior From Texas,” Collier’s 116 (August 18, 1945): 13, 79-82; Stetson Kennedy, Southern Exposure (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1946), 251; John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), 271 (suckers quotation).

[4] “Black on Blacks,” Time, April 27, 1936, pp. 12-13; Vance Muse [III], “Making Peace with Grandfather,” Texas Monthly (February 1986): 142 (Muse quotation);

[5] Davenport, “Savior From Texas,” 79; Victor Reisel, “Let’s Look at Labor: IV. How to Choke Unions,” The Nation 157 (July 31, 1943): 124 (Ulrey quotation); Vance Muse [III], “Making Peace with Grandfather,” Texas Monthly (February 1986): 116 (Muse quotation).

[6][6] Vance Muse to E. W. Montgomery, August 20, 1941 (strangle hold quotation), series 3, subseries 1, box 114, James Eastland Papers, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries, Oxford; The Christian American (newsletter), August 1941, ibid.

[7] Stetson Kennedy, Southern Exposure (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1946), 250 (peace officers quotation); Untitled pamphlet sent to Christian American Association supporters and signed by Vance Muse (Secretary-Treasurer) and Lewis Valentine Ulrey (chairman), reprinted in Fort Smith Labor News, October 29, 1943, p. 1 (protect quotation).

[8] The Christian American Association documented the start of the Right-to-Work movement in Arkansas in a pamphlet titled “Arkansas Travels.” This pamphlet was serialized in the Fort Smith Union News from January 4 through May 17, 1944.

[9] Stetson Kennedy, Southern Exposure, 84 (apes quotation); “‘Lastus with the Leastus’ (An Editorial),” Arkansas Farm Bureau Press (March 1945), p. 2 (black again white quotation).

[10] Walter Davenport, “Savior From Texas,” 82.

Four Years Later The Answers To Preventing Gun Violence Remain The Same

On Wednesday, February 14, seventeen people were killed and another fourteen were wounded in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The gunman allegedly used an AR-15 style semi-automatic assault rifle. The post below was originally published in June 2017—after an attack by a similarly armed gunman during practice for members of the GOP congressional baseball team—that discusses that availability of assault rifles, as well as responses to mass shootings. In addition, last October, ACSblog ran a post spotlighting a letter from 88 groups concerned with gun violence to state and federal lawmakers after the Las Vegas shooting, demanding action to address gun violence. With the 10th Anniversary of the landmark Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller coming up this June and gun violence remaining a national crisis, ACS will continue to highlight this issue on the ACSblog and in our programming.

Good Guys with Guns Myth 

*This blog was originally posted June 19, 2017

Wednesday’s horrific shooting during a practice for members of the GOP congressional baseball team was an unnecessary reminder of the prevalence of gun violence in the U.S. The event was notable for its high-profile victims, including Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), a member of House’s Republican Leadership, but it was otherwise bleakly common—an average of 90 people die from gun violence each day and, by some counts, this was the 195 mass shooting of 2017 (the 196th mass shooting occurred hours later in San Francisco).

The incident, which left five wounded, including a congressional aide, a lobbyist and two Capitol Police officers, was described by Breitbart with the headline “Man Opens Fire on Congressional Baseball Practice; Good Guy with Gun Shoots Back.” The “good guys with guns” narrative is an all too common trope we hear from the NRA and its allies after a high-profile shooting, particularly mass shootings. In 2012, a week after the Sandy Hook massacre left twenty-six dead, including twenty children, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” Since that time, this trope has been deployed in response to mass shootings to justify expanding gun availability and ownership and reducing or eliminating gun safety regulations. The only problem is that there’s no evidence that it’s true.

The epidemiology of mass shootings is complicated and anything but straightforward. That said, there are some things we do know. A review of mass shootings between 2000 and 2012 published by the FBI reveals that the median response time for police is three minutes. Admittedly, three minutes is a long time when facing an armed assailant, and with the aid of high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons, shooters are capable of inflicting grievous damage in such a short time. As Rep. Mike Bishop (R-Mich.), a witness to Wednesday’s attack, observed, “He had a rifle that was clearly meant for the job of taking people out, multiple casualties, and he had several rounds and magazines that he kept unloading and reloading.”

Even with the rapid response of police, half of all incidents end before the police arrive. In two-thirds of those cases, the shooter him or herself stops the attack by either leaving the scene or committing suicide. In the remaining cases, potential victims have subdued the shooter. Notably, in only three cases were guns used against the attackers to end the incident, and in two of those cases the person shooting was an off-duty police officer. It seems a good guy with a gun isn’t the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun.

Not only is the “good guys with guns” trope untrue, it’s dangerous. The idea that guns in the hands of civilians in active shooter situations will increase public safety strains credulity. In Wednesday’s shooting, the good guys were trained Capitol Police officers serving as the security detail for Rep. Scalise. Research suggests that, on average, police officers who discharge their firearms hit their intended target about 15 to 25 percent of the time. For civilians untrained and untested in high stress situations—even those who would consider themselves good marksmen—the hit percentage is bound to be much lower. Arming more civilians, particularly those whose previous experience and training with firearms is limited, and expecting them to engage active shooters only adds another volatile variable to an already fraught situation.

The 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona that left six dead and twelve others, including then Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), injured—the last time a member of Congress was a victim in a mass shooting—suggests how easily a good guy with a gun could exacerbate the situation. Joe Zamudio, a civilian with no formal gun training, heard shots and ran to the scene to intervene with his handgun. When he arrived, he saw a man holding a gun, "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter." In fact, he nearly shot Bill Badger, a 74-year-old retired United States Army Colonel, who had subdued the actual assailant. In 2014, in Las Vegas, an armed civilian trying to intervene in an active shooter situation in a WalMart was shot from behind by one of two assailants who had already executed two police officers. The danger of civilians engaging active shooters and potentially injuring more bystanders or themselves, or being mistaken for the assailant once police arrive, suggests that the answer to these mass shootings is not more guns.

In fact, according to the Violence Police Center, since 2007, 31 mass shootings resulting in 158 deaths have been committed by conceal carry permit holders, the very type of person who is supposed to be the good guy with a gun. Previous studies have found that more permissive conceal carry laws, often call right to carry or RTC laws, do not reduce the number of people killed or injured in a mass shooting.  It seems that the public is aware of this. In recent survey, 55% of respondents said allowing people to carry guns "in public places like grocery stores, restaurants [and] sporting events would make them less safe,"  while only 24% thoughts it would make them safer.

Despite the danger and public opposition, NRA-supported lawmakers continue to push RTC laws. States like Georgia, Texas and others have sought to limit or eliminate gun free zones, such as college campuses, bars, and churches. Members of Congress,  including Reps. Bishop and Brooks, have sought to nationalize the most permissive RTC laws by forcing states to honor conceal carry permits from any other state, even those with the most permissive laws.

There are many ways for the nation to productively respond to the violence that Wednesday’s shooting highlights, but pursing unpopular and potentially dangerous gun policies should not be one of them.

We “Love Our Constitution”

The American Constitution Society launched an initiative, “Love Our Constitution,”  in 2017 with the goal for lawyers, judges, and others to lead discussions and make presentations about the United States Constitution and the federal courts during the week of Valentine’s Day. I participated in 2017 and volunteered once again to conduct a presentation to the local Boy Scouts Troop.

On Monday, February 12, 2018, I presented the “Love Our Constitution” program to my sons’ troop, Queen of All Saints Basilica Boy Scout Troop 626. About 35 scouts and several adults were in attendance. We began by handing out copies of the United States Constitution provided by the ACS and discussing at a high level the document itself - one of the longest standing written constitutions in the world and also one of the shortest, with the original being just over 4,500 words. Scouts answered questions about which branch is addressed by each of the first three articles of the Constitution.

We then presented the program slides, which focused on Article III, the judiciary. As I went through the presentation, we asked questions of the attendees, including their thoughts on why federal judges served during good behavior, effectively making it a lifetime appointment. One boy scout answered that the intent was to distance the judiciary from the pressures and demands of fundraising and elections and that lifetime appointments allowed the judges to act independently.

We next turned to the federal courts of appeals and discussed that we sit in the 7th Circuit(and that our district court is the Northern District of Illinois). I mentioned an example of a long-serving judge who remains active and regularly hears cases. He is Judge William Bauer, who is 91 years old and has served on the 7th Circuit for more than 40 years.

I then discussed the vacancy process and the power of the president to nominate, and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint various positions, including Article III judges. We discussed the process and that advice and consent had never been defined, but the scouts thought it was an affirmative process the Senate must follow.

During the presentation, I discussed with the scouts the unique times we are living in. We had a great conversation about the removal of the 60 votes in the Senate for cloture and the decline of the blue slip process as reasons that judicial candidates with more ideological views were being confirmed. We discussed that we are seeing a struggle over which of the three branches is supreme, with some arguing that the Supreme Court is not “supreme.” We discussed various nullification efforts taking place especially at the state level, such as in Pennsylvania.

Lastly, we talked about my views on the Federalist Society and other organizations having such influence on judicial selections. We noted that circuit courts are the court of last resort in many instances and reiterated the goal of having federal judges who hold more moderate views.

The opportunity to teach the Constitution and the courts to these young people proved to me once again that we as Americans should “love our Constitution” and the concise genius it represents.

Dan Cotter is a partner at Latimer LeVay Fyock LLC and an Adjunct Professor at The John Marshall Law School, where he teaches SCOTUS Judicial Biographies. He is a frequent writer and presenter on the Constitution and the Supreme Court.  The article contains his opinions and is not to be attributed to anyone else.