The National Rifle Association’s answer to preventing school shootings, according to Wayne LaPierre, is having “a properly trained — armed — good guy” in every school in the nation. If a heavily armed murderer is determined to kill a large number of people and is aware that a school is guarded, what prevents him from going on a rampage at an easier target, such as a movie theater, a shopping mall or some other public place.

This twisted logic of armed good guys is no guarantee of preventing gun violence. Consider the following tragedies: 1) Columbine, which had an armed security guard at the school and a motorcycle officer nearby, both of whom fired shots at Eric Harris, to no avail. 2) Virginia Tech, which had its own police department consisting of 40 officers who were unable to stop the killing of 32 people. 3) Last week, the Texas district attorney, himself a gun owner, who was shot 20 times by a bad guy with a gun.

The cost of armed guards in the 132,000 schools in the United States is estimated to cost $7.2 billion, which the NRA says the federal government should fund. Legislation ensuring universal background checks and restrictions on assault weapons and large capacity magazines would cost the tax payers nothing and would help fix the problem at its root rather than relying on good guy versus bad guy shootouts.

Unfortunately, this lame proposal by the NRA leadership will garner support from those spineless legislators who will hide behind the pretense of doing something about gun violence because they don’t have the courage to even consider real solutions.

ALAN CIPRIANI

Lafayette