John Oliver has a pretty good idea of what will help stop school shootings — and it’s not putting armed police officers in those schools. That, he says, has made and will only continue to make things significantly worse.
The “Last Week Tonight” host used his main story on Sunday night to debunk the perceived effectiveness of adding armed school resource officers (SROs) throughout the country. Of course, he first had to point out some of the more outlandish suggestions from conservatives that have come out in recent weeks.
In the wake of the horrific shooting in Uvalde, Texas, right-wing politicians have suggested everything from adding religion to curriculums to decreasing the number of doors on a school building to, as one former FBI employee suggested, using “blankets that you can put up on the wall that are colorful and beautiful, but they’re ballistic blankets.”
“What are you talking about?!” Oliver mocked in response. “‘Use a blanket’ is not a strategy for stopping deaths during a school shooting. It’s barely a strategy for ‘a bird got in the house.’”
But, turning to the idea of having armed officers in schools, Oliver was equally skeptical. According to the late night host, since the Columbine Massacre in 1999, more than $750 million has been given to schools by the federal government, and more than 6500 SROs have been hired in schools nationwide. According to Oliver, “the most recent data available shows 58% of American schools report having a sworn law enforcement officer on campus at least once a week.”
That said, Oliver pointed out that both the schools in Uvalde and Parkland, Florida had armed officers on campus. He also pulled up a study which found that “when you have armed officers on the scene, you actually see more casualties, often because that perpetrator is suicidal. They’re familiar with that school. They know that officer is there and so they come in heavily armed.” So, Oliver questioned why arming school resource officers is continually suggested.
“If school cops can make shootings worse, why then are we still pitching them as a solution? If OFF! discovered that their mosquito repellent attracted mosquitoes, they’d stopped selling it, or at the very least rebrand it as a cologne for lonely mosquito bachelors,” Oliver joked. “The point is, the evidence for cops in schools deterring school shootings just is not there, and the evidence for the damage they can do is significant.”
Oliver then pulled data on arrests that have happened in these schools, marveling at what these children have gotten in trouble for (including “assault for things like throwing a paper airplane, a baby carrot and Skittles).
“The presence of police can make school miserable for some kids, and we frankly, don’t need any more ways to make school scarier,” he added. “It’s already terrifying enough. If you ask me, what is the scariest place I can imagine? It’s not a haunted house or the inside of Tom Cruise’s brain. It’s high school.”
The “Last Week Tonight” host eventually put things even more bluntly, saying “I honestly think no one makes a better case for defunding the police than the police themselves.”
Calling out one police officer, who said that having armed officers in school “couldn’t hurt,” if only for the possibility of building trust of law enforcement with kids, Oliver strongly disagreed.
“The answer to that is it absolutely can, and it does all the time,” he said. “And for all the arguing right now about how we need more police in schools, I would argue that we may actually need significantly less and small reforms just are not going to cut it here.”
You can watch John Oliver’s full segment in the video above.