The NRA’s Biggest Back-to-School Sale: The Safety of Our Children
The NRA's feckless "School Shield" program
By: Morgan Spry
The back-to-school season was always one of excitement for me. I loved shopping with my parents to buy color-coded folders and a new lunch box for the year. My only anxiety was who I would sit with at lunch. That was until December 2012, when the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School changed everything.
I was 10 years old finishing my last year in elementary school, and could not understand how something so evil could happen in a place where I felt so safe, even though it occurred hundreds of miles away from me. Like many people, I felt like my world had been rocked, and the few changes made as a result of this tragedy did little to comfort me.
I used to be annoyed by my parents' insistence on having the evening news playing in the background during our family dinner, but now I was tuned in. I was startled when I saw my mom standing outside of our school in the freezing New York winter waiting in line with all of the other parents eager to join their child's classroom holiday party. Instead of just walking in the door as usual, she was now slipped a piece of paper to sign in from the school secretary, hidden behind a piece of plexiglass.
The most significant change for my family at that time was one I wasn’t even aware of until many years later: my dad, a police officer for the county, would now spend any free time he had between calls vigilantly sitting in his squad car in my school parking lot.
While some policymakers were working hard at this time to create legislation to prevent this kind of nightmare from ever happening again, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was busy revving up its PR machine to protect gun industry profits.
The NRA unveiled its “School Shield” program just days after the Sandy Hook mass shooting. The program aims to improve school security by providing grants to school districts to purchase security equipment, such as bulletproof windows, and conduct research on the best ways to protect children during an active shooter situation. Their programming argues for arming teachers and school resource officers to prevent casualties during an active shooter event.
However, we have seen that even schools with an armed resource officer can face mass casualties in an active shooter situation.
In fact, in the 133 incidents of K-12 school shootings from 1980 to 2019, 25% had an armed guard on the scene. Additionally, researchers have found the presence of armed guards not only fails to result in fewer casualties, but correlates with a 2.83 times greater death rate.
During the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the school resource officer did not even enter the building. And during the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, none of the 376 law enforcement personnel at the school approached the gunman for 77 minutes — despite the fact that 91 armed officers were on site within two minutes of the first gunshot.
Ultimately, the School Shield program is a feeble, cynical attempt to protect the NRA from bad press around its culpability in contributing to America’s school shooting epidemic.
It implies that guns are not the problem, security is. The solution isn’t limiting access to firearms, it’s bulletproofing windows and installing cameras. What’s more, the program has received inadequate funding since its inception, serving as little more than window dressing. Between its official launch in 2014 and 2019, the program received just .08% of the NRA’s total revenue in funding.
By promoting the idea of arming teachers and pushing the mentality of “a good guy with a gun” — despite research that disproves the safety of these principles — the NRA prioritizes higher profits for the American gun industry over lower violence in American schools.
We should focus on passing policies and funding programs that will address the root causes of school shootings, instead of applying a Band-Aid over a resurfacing problem. An overwhelming majority of Americans support constructive policy positions such as universal background checks, banning assault style weapons, and raising the age to purchase a fire-arm from 18 to 21.
Additionally, increased funding to promote community-based crisis intervention and after school programs, along with increased staffing for mental health professionals within schools, can all work to prevent a school shooting from happening in the first place — as opposed to doing damage control after a tragedy occurs.
The NRA and the politicians that they back are well aware of all these options, yet continue to put the safety of our children on the line in order to create profits. It is past time that the NRA is held accountable for their inaction through their bogus School Shield program.
Morgan Spry is a senior at The Ohio State University studying Public Affairs and Political Science. She is a communications intern at Brady, and previously served as a press intern in the United States Senate.
Morgan writes classic account of disillusionment which young people today must live: that of shifting from the narrow, self-centered concerns of finding oneself in the course of being educated, to the pressing need for educating oneself with adult concerns. This would include realizing the irony of the NRA's School Shield program's inclusion of bullet-proofing school windows. She astutely points out that getting rid of guns is a surer method of making schools and all safe spaces bullet-proof.