Schools that allow teachers to carry guns are safer than schools that are "gun free zones"

Here is a link to a paper by John Lott, "Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns are Extremely Safe: Data on the Rate of Shootings and Accidents in Schools that allow Teachers to Carry".

Here are some excerpts.
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ABSTRACT

After the Columbine school shooting 20 years ago, one of the more significant changes in how we protect students has been the advance of legislation that allows teachers to carry guns at schools. There are two obvious questions: Does letting teachers carry create dangers? Might they deter attackers? Twenty states currently allow teachers and staff to carry guns to varying degrees on school property, so we don’t need to guess how the policy would work. There has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between 6 AM and midnight at a school that lets teachers carry guns. Fears of teachers carrying guns in terms of such problems as students obtaining teachers guns have not occurred at all, and there was only one accidental discharge outside of school hours with no one was really harmed. While there have not been any problems at schools with armed teachers, the number of people killed at other schools has increased significantly – doubling between 2001 and 2008 versus 2009 and 2018.

INTRODUCTION

Police are very important in fighting crime, but a single officer in uniform faces an almost impossible task in stopping mass public shootings.1 Officers become the first targets in these attacks, as attackers know that if they kill the officer, they will have free reign to continue their massacre. Even if officers aren’t in uniform, attackers may be able to guess from their behavior that they are standing guard.

Putting a guard in every school is also very costly. Florida is spending over $400 million a year to put one police officer in each public school.2

Increasing funding for mental health services has its benefits, but it is hard for mental-health professionals to identify patients who pose a serious violent threat. It’s common for mass killers to have already been seeing psychiatrists before their attacks. But mental health professionals are often unable to identify when someone is at risk of becoming violent. Psychiatrists overlooked the dangers posed by Ivan Lopez (the recent Fort Hood shooter), Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook Elementary), James Holmes (“Batman” movie theater) and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech).3 Indeed, from January 1998 through May 2018, 42 percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals before their attacks. In only one of those cases had the killer previously been identified as a danger to others.4 We can't foresee every attack, so what's our backup plan when violence does occur?

Within hours of mass public shootings, even before we know how the shooter obtained his gun, there are immediate calls for laws such as universal background checks. Ironically, there is not one mass public shooting this century that would have been stopped by universal background checks, even with a perfectly enforced law.5

Outside of arming teachers and staff, there's only so much that can be done to secure our schools. Schools have multiple entrances to facilitate smooth evacuations in case of fires or other emergencies. Even if school doors are set up so that they can be opened only from the inside, it's easy enough to have someone on the inside to open a door. Even where there is only one attacker, doors can be propped open.

Having a single entrance with a metal detector creates its own safety hazards by leading to crowded bottlenecks of people that present easy targets to attackers. Metal detectors won’t stop someone from shooting their way into a school.

But if attackers don't know who is carrying a concealed firearm, they won’t know whom they need to attack first.

Perhaps because police understand the difficulty of their jobs, they are strongly in favor of abolishing gun-free school zones. Shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, PoliceOne, a 450,000-member private organization of police (380,000 active, full-time and 70,000 retired officers), surveyed its members and found that 77 percent supported arming
teachers and/or school staff.6 Eighty-six percent of the officers believed that casualties in mass public shootings would have been reduced or altogether prevented if legally-armed citizens had been able to carry guns.7

Allowing teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns is nothing new in the United States, and hasn't created any problems. Before the early 1990s, there were no state laws specifically restricting concealed carry on K-12 property so that teacher carry may have been common for much of our history.

School insurance rates are no higher for schools that allow teachers to carry. “From what I’ve seen in Utah, rates have not gone up because of guns being allowed,” says Curt Oda, former president of the Utah Association of Independent Insurance Agents.8 An additional survey of schools in Arkansas, Kansas, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas also did not indicate that teacher carry had caused an increase in insurance premiums.9 Insurance fees significantly declined in Kansas. 

A CHART