I have received your letter regarding my request that you grant a hearing to SB 6479, the School Protection Act, in the Education Committee, which reads as follows:

Senator McAuliffe, I am writing this as an open letter because there are facts of this issue that have been buried and lied about for years, at the cost of a great many lives. The time is now to open this issue to truthful debate. This is not an issue of convenience or luxury, this is a life or death matter and I would like to believe that the lives of school children and the other citizens of this state would take some precedence over the normal partisan squabbling we have all come to expect from Olympia. I have not taken up this cause for any reason other than this: I am sick and tired of seeing innocent people die, only to have those guilty of facilitating the killings place the blame on those who would have seen them saved. The School Protection Act bill may die, and if it does then so be it. But the truth of this issue is going to see the light of day, and when I am finished everyone is going to know which side of the truth they stand on.

Let us continue.

Your assertion that school personnel are incapable of stopping armed attacks is patently untrue. There have been cases already of armed people who are not police stopping school attackers in their tracks, and to date the failure rate of civilian armed defense in schools is zero percent, as opposed to 100 percent for "gun free school zones." In Pearl, Mississippi, during the shooting rampage that took place there, assistant principal Joel Myrick ran to his car, retrieved his .45 auto, and confronted the shooter whereupon he surrendered. In Edinboro Pennsylvania, at the shooting that took place at a school celebration in a restaurant, the restaurant owner pursued the shooter with a shotgun and the shooter surrendered. In the recent shooting at the law school in Virginia, it was an armed student who made the shooter surrender.

All of these cases have the following things in common:

1. Lives were still in danger when the shooters were confronted.
2. The shooters surrendered immediately upon being confronted with a firearm, with no shots fired at them.
3. Each of these shooters could have been stopped a lot faster had the defenders had their weapons on their person, thus saving more lives.
4. The major news media concealed the fact that armed civilians stopped the shooters. That is to say, they LIED.

You state in your letter that you believe police and armed security provide sufficient armed protection. Well, you can no longer make the case that armed defense is not the answer, because you have just freely admitted that it is. The case you seem to be making is that 1) There is sufficient police and security protection now, and 2) Only government officers are capable of protecting schools.

About five to ten percent of schools in Washington currently have a full time armed officer. What do you propose the other 90 percent do if attacked? If you want to hire armed security for every K-12 school in the state, the cost will run about sixteen million or higher for their salaries alone (at about $40,000), not counting insurance and other costs. For that cost you will get one armed guard per school, which is a very minimal level of protection.

Armed school personnel on the other hand, can pay for their own training, buy their own weapons, handle their own liability issues, and protect lives at school for absolutely free. What a deal, huh? It makes no economical sense to pay people to do what we can do for ourselves. It is training that determines qualifications to protect life, not the donning of a government uniform. Putting federal uniforms on illegal immigrants without diplomas has not made them qualified airport security screeners, nor will it make a difference in schools.

As for your statement that school personnel are not trained to protect lives with a gun, in cases where that's true the answer is simple: Train them! For a raw recruit who has never fired a gun, it takes on average 80 hours of training to qualify a person to the level required for a police officer. (Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission.) That's for people who have never trained with guns. This being America, most of us have. While I do not believe that passing a government test should be a requirement to exercise one's right to protect oneself and others, I do believe that schools and parents have a right to ask that people protecting their kids should get the qualifications. I would not go along with an amendment allowing the state to dictate training requirements, but I would go along with an amendment allowing schools the authority and discretion to require certification. They must have this discretion though, because in an emergency, such as if a shooting threat has been made, they may not have time to worry about the paperwork.

You also stated that police are trained to "prevent injury and death by exercising restraint in a crisis situation." For all the good work they do, this is frequently not the case, as illustrated by the recent revelation that a SWAT officer shot and killed one of the Columbine victims. An armed teacher would not have made that mistake. Two percent of civilian self-defense shootings involve accidental killings of innocent people. The error rate for police is 11 percent, or five and one half times that level. (Cramer C and Kopel D. "Shall issue: the new wave of concealed handgun permit laws." Golden CO: Independence Institute Issue Paper. October 17, 1994.) What this means is that armed teachers are only a fraction as likely as police to shoot innocent students if you go by those numbers. If you consider the protective nature of most teachers, and the fact that they recognize the kids and know who the troublemakers are and aren't, I suspect that the risk would actually be far less than that even. Remember the case in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where a teacher by the name of Shannon Wright shielded children with her body, and died doing so. It is insulting to suggest that people like her would indiscriminately spray bullets in the direction of young bystanders.

When you mention the time a man left a gun laying on a shelf in the bathroom in your place of business, you seem to insinuate that teachers will be leaving their guns laying about in the schools. The bill is very clear on this. If the gun is removed from your person for any reason, it shall be placed in secure locked storage until it can be worn again.

The average number of children under 14 killed yearly in this state by a gun accident is one. That number ranks dead last among the major causes of accidental deaths, and is far surpassed by car accidents, fires, poisons, drownings, etc. How does your own safety record look? Have you ever left matches accessible to children? Swimming pools? Bottles of Drano?

Have you ever left your car keys where a teenager could reach them?

You might also like to note that under current state law, parents can carry guns into schools while picking up or dropping off students. If you can point to a single problem ever resulting from that, please let me know what it was. Why is it parents can carry in schools and teachers who are directly responsible for student's safety can't?

When you state that "school violence must be stopped by reaching out to children who strike out with violence because no one hears their cries for help," I have to reply that some violent kids aren't crying for help. Some of them are just plain mean and violent, and need to be defended against.

I am all in favor of preventative measures. Counseling, intervention, security checks and other measures all have their worth. But none of these things will physically stop a shooter in cases where the prevention has failed and the shooting has already begun. All the counseling in the world has been of no help to those who have died already, nor those who will be killed in the future because they were left unprotected. If you could go back in time to the Moses Lake shooting and hand just one thing to the teacher closest to the shooter, what would it be? Would it be a loaded gun to stop the shooter with? Or would it be a sensitivity training booklet? There has to be a last ditch defense in place for times when nothing else will work.

The Granite Hills shooting from March of 2001 has proven not only the effectiveness of armed defense during the incident, but also the deterrent effect. The news image that was broadcast after that incident was of the shooter lying on a stretcher in handcuffs, with blood pouring out of his jaw. There were no school shootings at all for the entire remainder of the year. Mass shooters all have one thing in common. They don't mind shooting others, and frequently don't mind shooting themselves afterward. But one thing none of them want to do is to be shot by someone else. That's why when confronted with a gun, they either give up or commit suicide. There is only one thing that can truly stop and dissuade them, and that is the threat of ending up like the Granite Hills shooter. Perhaps not every single victim can be saved, but how many have to be saved to make it worthwhile? If only one child is saved, isn't that enough?

Given their perfect record of failure and endangerment, it astonishes me that you are considering making the Capitol building a "gun free zone." Unless you make the Capitol into a completely secure facility, with metal detectors at every door and armed police in every room and hallway and area outside, the only ones you'll be protecting are the ones who might go there to attack people. If not by means of armed defense, how do you believe you can stop killers in the act? Gun show background checks? Get real. You can't stop criminal people from buying illegal guns any more than you can stop them from buying illegal cocaine. All you can accomplish by trying is to stop citizens of your state from being able to save themselves and others, and that is what has been accomplished in "gun free zones" already. They are a lie, and they are getting people killed.

In the course of this project, people have been quick to lecture me about "political realities." I have done what I can to be accommodating of this, but there is another type of reality that I am far more concerned about. That is the reality that exists outside of the Capitol. Every time a new law gets passed inside those walls, those of us out here in the real world have to live with the consequences of that law. The consequences of "gun free zones" have been death for some students and adults, terror for the majority of the rest, and the never-ending specter of knowing this nightmare will happen again, maybe at their school, and if it does that no one can lawfully save them. That's why if I don't seem to be as concerned with "political realities" as I should be, it's because I'm looking at a much bigger picture, and it's not a pretty one. I believe it is fair to ask our lawmakers to have some consideration for this reality as well.

Hear this bill. This is a life or death matter and it must be confronted. If the bill dies afterward, then so be it, but if you refuse to hear it then you run a grave risk. That risk is that there will be further school killings in this state, and if there are, you will be on record as having been the one who refused to hear the only solution offered that could have physically stopped the shooter. And I will assuredly be there to publicly remind you.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

Kevin Schmadeka
Freedom Restoration Project
P.O. Box 106
Burlington, WA 98233
(360) 757-7122