Armed guards in schools? Reaction to NRA is swift and strong.

Gun-control advocates responded swiftly – and negatively – to the National Rifle Association’s unusual presentation Friday to the media calling for armed guards in the nation’s schools.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, cochair of the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said the NRA “offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America.” Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D) of New York, one of the House’s most vocal proponents of gun control, said she was saddened that the NRA had missed “an opportunity to help unite the nation behind efforts to reduce gun violence.”

The Violence Policy Center (VPC) in Washington noted that there were two armed law enforcement agents at Columbine High School during the 1999 armed attack by two students that killed 15 people.

“They twice engaged and fired at Eric Harris [one of the assailants] in an effort to stop the shooting, but were unsuccessful because they were outgunned by the assault weapons wielded by the two teens,” VPC executive director Josh Sugarmann said in a statement.

All spoke a week after a massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 first-graders and six staff dead. The slaughter of children has awoken the nation to what President Obama calls an “epidemic” of gun violence in a way that earlier mass shootings – in Tucson, Ariz., and Aurora, Colo. – have not.

Notably, Rep. Mike Thompson (D) of California, chairman of the new congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force that was formed in response to the massacre last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School, did not explicitly reject the NRA’s proposal to put armed guards in every school. Instead, he called for a fuller response to gun violence that addresses mental health services, access to guns and ammunition, and American culture.

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