Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is moving away from education policy, to spreading a particularly insane idea to combat gun violence. (RELATED: Blaming Guns for Violence Is Dumb … This Dumb).
If Congress won’t pass the kind of gun laws that Duncan and his colleagues want, then it’s time to boycott schools until they do.
In response to a tweet from the executive director of the Education Post, which suggested that “it’s time for America’s 50 million school parents to simply pull their kids out of school until we have better gun laws,” Duncan seconded the idea. “This is brilliant, and tragically necessary. What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe? My family is all in if we can do this at scale. Parents, will you please join us?” tweeted Duncan.
This is brilliant, and tragically necessary.
What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe?
My family is all in if we can do this at scale.
Parents, will you please join us? https://t.co/Yo4wsFuJI5— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) May 18, 2018
Admittedly, I’m a bit confused at how he expects this to play off. It’s almost summer break time for most school-aged children, and Congress is basically done legislating for the year. So those kids are going to be out of school until at least 2019 when gun control legislation could simply be proposed – and then debated over what would take months (before probably being voted down, given how gun control legislation has fared historically in America).
The biggest problem with Duncan’s plan, however, is that it makes children less safe. Schools are among the safest places to be in America, so why would you remove a child from one in hopes of improving their safety?
As an analysis from Unbiased America showed:
if you take suicides out of the overall firearm death rate, schools are still far, far safer than elsewhere:
Overall Firearm Homicide Rate: 4.3 per 100,000
School Firearm Homicide Rate: 0.013 per 100,000Therefore, if the data excludes suicides, schools are 331 times safer that the overall U.S. rate.
The figures are even starker when represented graphically:
There are over 10,000 gun homicides in America, mostly gang and drug-related. In years where there are school shootings, they usually account for fewer than 30, or 0.3%, of the total gun homicides.
I point this out not to argue against increased school safety, but to point out that people like Duncan aren’t actually concerned with reducing gun violence. They’re concerned with combating the kind of gun violence that produces the most emotional response.
Do you think this proposal is completely bogus? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
