Weigel

Wayne LaPierre Wants Armed Guards at Schools. Columbine Had an Armed Guard.

There will be more to say later about the NRA’s “press conference” in Washington—a staged event with no question-and-answer period. For now, I can show you the strange set-up, which put NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and other speakers far from the press, separated by a velvet-covered partition.
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There was a point. After some meandering around about video-game violence, LaPierre proposed a national initiative—funded by your tax dollars—to put armed guards in schools. “With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school?” he asked. “I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school—and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.” But this isn’t an entirely new idea. You probably don’t remember the name of Neil Gardner, a sheriff’s deputy in Jefferson County, Colo. He was the armed guard assigned to watch Columbine High School who usually ate lunch with the students, so he could be in the school.