Op-ed: Democracy Is Violent, So Let’s Make Sure to Not Arm Teachers

In an op-ed published in the Arizona Capitol Times, “international human rights attorney” Dianne Post took upon herself the obligation of warning her countrymen that “Violence is being used to destroy democracy.”

The title of her article is certainly shocking — unless you’ve ever read history.

“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths,” James Madison wrote in 1787, getting the jump on Ms. Post by about 236 years.

Mind you, James Madison’s warning wasn’t exactly breaking news, even in 1787.

Here’s an example of democracy and the violence that has always been associated with it in history:

In the year 427 B.C., the citizens of democratic Athens exercised the potential violence of such a polity by condemning all the adult male citizens of the town of Mytilene to be executed and the women and children to be sold into slavery. The crime committed by Mytilene was to seemingly switch alliances to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, as recorded by Thucydides.

Fortunately for the population of Mytilene, the next day the political winds blew in their favor, and the people of Athens voted not to carry out the previous day’s deadly decision. They convened once more and overturned their previous ruling. Through a swift and timely communication with their commander, the revised decision arrived just in the nick of time, sparing the town from the devastating consequences of the earlier order. Under the revised directive, only a limited number of executions occurred, specifically targeting the leading insurgents responsible for the betrayal.

Plato, in his Republic, describes democracy as “lawless” and ultimately the scene of constant revolutions, because “democracy is a law of contraries; the excess of freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the greater the slavery.”

I think the point is made. Democracy is violent because humans are prone to violence, and democracy aims at affording to the violent and the peaceful the same power to enforce their will. So, democracy is always destroyed by violence, in that violence sees the strong made into masters and the weak turned into slaves.

Next, Ms. Post claims that “Gun violence is the leading cause of death for U.S. children.” Simply put, that’s not true. According to the latest data available online, cancer, accidents, and suicide all rank higher on the list of the leading causes of death for American children. That in no way denies that it’s tragic when children are killed with guns; of course not. The issue with Ms. Post’s claim is that she uses her incorrect identification of “gun violence” as the leading cause of death of American children as a springboard for claims that similarly are incorrect and irrational. Then, her solution for the problems she invents is likewise unreasonable, untenable, and unconstitutional.

Here is her identification of the problem:

On April 6, Tennessee lawmakers flew their racist flag high as they expelled two Black representatives for participating in a peaceful First Amendment protest while hanging on tight to the money of the gun lobby. Their time is running out and now they have just lost two generations of children who have been stalked by gun violence their whole lives.

Post points out that these same “racist” lawmakers spend their time “attacking women’s reproductive autonomy,” proving that they don’t really care about kids because if they did, they’d ban guns rather than abortion.

Isn’t it philosophically confusing how the same people insisting on depriving fellow citizens of the fundamental right to defend themselves also insist it is a fundamental right of every woman to have her baby murdered in utero? More than 56 million babies have been killed by abortion since 1973, whereas since the year 2000 there have been 175 people killed in school shootings. That’s still tragic, as is every murder, but the number of victims at schools would undoubtedly be fewer if the schools were not easy targets that the perpetrators knew could be attacked without fear of armed resistance.

Ironically, Post claims that the call by some legislators in several states to arm teachers is causing generations of kids to grow up afraid of being killed when they go to school.

Consider Cesare Beccaria’s assessment of Post’s opinion that armed teachers would put kids in greater danger of armed violence:

[Disarmament] certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and the assailants better, and encourages rather than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed persons than those that are armed.

Beyond that irrefutable statement of fact, there is another fact that would likely displease Ms. Post. Between 2000 and 2018, 94 percent of school shootings took place in public schools. How many of the kids killed or wounded in those atrocities could have been saved had there been teachers armed and trained to neutralize armed intruders? 

Of course, if we could snap our fingers and make every gun on earth disappear, then, yes, there were be fewer gun deaths.

Void of magically eliminating all weapons everywhere, though, the barrier between a person and the purchase of a weapon is some law or regulation. Is it not obvious that if someone is willing to commit the cold-blooded murder of innocent children, he won’t be deterred by regulations standing between him and obtaining a weapon? 

Legally or illegally, criminals will get guns if they want them. It doesn’t take magic, however, to eliminate children’s risk of being victims of an armed killer by not sending them for eight or nine hours a day into buildings where the “law” requires everybody there to be unarmed. 

If, as is likely to be the case, millions of families continue sending their children to those vulnerable buildings, then at least — if we truly care about young children — we could try to even the odds by giving responsible, well-trained adults access to the weapons and knowledge of the tactics necessary to defend the defenseless.