AR-15 rifles in U.S. schools: Is this the best way to tackle mass shootings?

After the tragedy of the Uvalde school shooting that killed 19 kids and two teachers, some schools in the US started stocking up on AR-15 rifles to be used to tackle a gunman, but critics are worried the measure will lead to more incidents.

In Florida, a school district is putting a safe for an AR-15 assault rifle and ammunition inside each school to respond to school shootings. In North Carolina and Pittsburgh, other counties have done the same.

The AR-15 is only inside the school while the resource officer is on campus. They bring in the AR-15 rifle in a case in the mornings and put it in the safe at the school. Then they remove the rifle from the safe when they leave in the evenings, as explained by the Vero Beach, Florida sheriff.

While there aren’t official databases with the numbers of districts that utilize such a strategy, it is becoming more common as school safety holds national attention, said Mac Hardy, director of operations at the National Association of School Resource Officers. 

While some parents were supportive of the measure, others expressed concerns. Experts in school safety, too, said that while the measure could help save lives, it also poses many risks.

In an active shooter situation, semiautomatic rifles, like the AR-15, could be more useful in stopping a shooter than a standard sidearm, such as a handgun that police hold in a holster, said Ken Trump, a school safety consultant and president of National School Safety and Security Services.

Inn 2019 two former students broke into a school in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee, and stole an AR-15 rifle from an SRO office, according to reporting from News Channel 5 Nashville.

To avoid the most serious risk, schools would need to ensure the weapons are locked in a safe in an SRO’s office, and that the office is also locked, experts said. As well as using biometric safes that require a thumbprint rather than a key or combination lock to secure the guns and ensure quick access.

Any room with weapons should also have intrusion alarms to ensure that school resource officers know when someone has entered and may have access to the gun, they added.

The idea of having AR-15s in schools, however, does not sit well with Dorothy Espelage, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor in the School of Education who has conducted decades of study and research on school safety and student well-being.

“What’s going to happen is we’re going to have accidents with these guns”, Espelage told WLOS-TV. “Just the presence of an SRO increases violence in the schools. There are more arrests of kids. Why is it that they have to have these AR-15s? It doesn’t make any sense”, she said.

AR-15-style semiautomatic weapons are civilian versions of military weapons that gun control advocates say aren't very different. It is designed to kill people quickly and in large numbers.

This is why it seems to be the weapon of choice for a lot of mass shooters. The gunman in Uvalde, who killed 19 children and two teachers, was using an AR-15-style rifle. So was the shooter at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida that killed 17 people in 2018.

The gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, that took 27 lives, was also using an AR-15 rifle. So was the man who killed 58 people in Las Vegas when he shot them from his hotel room.

The families of nine victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting agreed to a $73 million settlement of a lawsuit against the maker of the rifle used to kill 20 first-graders and six teachers in 2012.

The families of three children who survived the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting are pursuing legal action in separate cases, as well.

Another reason the AR-15 rifle is the weapon of choice for school shooters, could be the fact that some states’ laws allow 18-year-olds to purchase them, and most school shooters are students themselves or graduated recently.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton banned the AR-15 and other similar semiautomatic rifles. After its ban, mass shootings went down in the decade that followed, NPR reported in 2018. But once the ban expired in 2004, gun manufacturers quickly began production and sales rose.

AR-15-style weapons are semiautomatic, meaning its mechanism automatically loads a round of cartridge, which typically carries 30 rounds, but requires the shooter to pull the trigger to fire each shot.

On the other hand, a shooter with a fully automatic assault rifle can pull and hold the trigger and the weapon will fire until the ammunition supply is spent. However, fully automatic weapons have been heavily restricted in the U.S. since the 1934 National Firearms Act.

While gun control advocates say the AR-15 has no valid recreational use, and civilians should not be allowed to own them, the gun industry and gun owners say they are used for hunting, target practice and shooting competitions and should remain legal, according to an NPR 2018 report.