A guest post from the National Rifle Association

We are all appalled and horrified by the senseless tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We are all left asking how this could have happened. Could this nightmare have been avoided? And who is to blame?

Some people are saying that guns are too freely available, and that to avoid future tragedies like the one we saw in Connecticut we must clamp down on the supply of guns. But that’s no solution at all, because the real problem is not guns but the people carrying them.

Schools continue to experience these horrors because there are too many bad people in our communities. But how do we rid ourselves of bad people? Do we rely on our justice and mental health systems to identify and treat people showing signs of derangement, before they get their hands on weapons? Of course not! No matter how many interventions our social and mental health services stage for these people, some of them are just going to turn out all wrong.

We can throw billions of dollars at fixing or incarcerating these people, and yet we still can’t guarantee that some lone gunman won’t turn up at your kid’s school tomorrow.  So how are you going to feel safe?

I bet you’d feel safer if you knew that any motherf**ker who even dared to raise his gun at your precious babies would die in a hail of bullets. And yet some people insist that the solution is fewer guns!

Had the Connecticut killer been shot down in a murderous rain of gunfire the moment he raised a weapon, we would not now as a nation be mourning so many dead children.

This is something gun control advocates just don’t don’t get. Their solution is to take guns out of the hands of the good people, the people who would intervene to put a stop to the murder of our children.

We have become less safe, not because we are a nation of gun fanatics, but because some people continue to believe that bad people can be somehow treated, reasoned with, identified and discouraged.

It won’t work. The only thing that will work is to make the spree killer’s mission futile. If your spree killer knows he’ll be gunned down the moment he even tries to kill someone, he’ll just stay home and watch America’s Got Talent, and this quiet time may even allow him the opportunity to reflect upon the futility of violence.

The NRA has a three-pronged plan to make our children safer, but it won’t work if we listen to those now demanding that our legislators push through gun control laws.

The first step in our plan is to make sure every school has at least one armed police officer patrolling the grounds and corridors. It’s a start, but it’s not a solution on its own. Some school massacres have taken place despite the presence of armed police on the school grounds. In a large campus it could be five to ten minutes before an officer arrives at the scene, and by that time dozens of our precious children could have been gunned down.

So the second part of the plan is to make guns available in every classroom. This means arming teachers. Not just allowing teachers to have access to a handgun tucked away safely in a desk drawer, because what use will that be when a shooter enters the classroom and sees the teacher standing at the front of the class, away from their desk? No, the teacher’s gun will have to be on a holster at their hip.

But if we really want to keep our kids safe we need to go even further, and this is where the third part of our plan kicks in. An armed teacher might be able to drop a shooter, but what if they miss? What if in a moment of panic the teacher fumbles the weapon? Bear in mind that very many of these shooter types have fantasised over every scenario for months on end and are ready for any eventuality. Even with teachers armed it is still a very uneven contest.

That’s why the only real solution is to arm our children. Your average spree killer stands no chance at all if every kid in the classroom is packing heat. If every child has a gun in their bag or on their desk, at least one of them is going to blow away anyone who tries to take a shot at them. Heck, we all know how competitive kids can be, and they’d probably make a contest out of who could gun down the next person who came through the classroom door, whether it’s a parent, a teacher, or another child. So your average armed killer stands no chance whatsoever.

Gun control advocates will try to convince you that arming our kids is a crazy idea and would result in children shooting each other over the most trivial of schoolyard disagreements.  But these people are losing sight of the bigger issue. Our schools are already unsafe, because bad people can just walk in and start firing away. Surely, then, the only solution is to fire back. Arm the school, arm the teachers, arm the children, and your spree killer will be stopped in his tracks.

Or we can try banning guns and treating the mentally ill, but does that make you feel any safer? Exactly!