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The Huffington Post recently ran a story featuring Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA saying that,

"Putting police and armed security guards in our schools to protect our children ... it's the one thing that would keep people safe"

Is a school with a regular police presence or armed security less likely to be involved in a school shooting incident?

This is not the same as this question about your average bystander, but about qualified, trained guards or police.

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    What does "safer" mean? If you're talking about mass murders, then US schools are already 99% safe from those, regardless of security. There might be a do-able study on gun incidents, but there are so many factors, that trying to measure the effect of armed security would be difficult (since armed security is very rare in US schools, outside of large events like sports games). Until these points are clarified, this is just about opinions.
    – Clay07g
    Feb 23, 2018 at 16:50
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    @Clay07g There won't be a study on gun incidents. The NRA lobbied and Congress obeyed, legislatively forbidding the CDC to even try to study the patterns.
    – Shadur
    Feb 24, 2018 at 11:55
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    @Shadur Ah, yes, the NRA's invisible force field that prevents each and every person from looking at the data that's publicly available. Forgot that the CDC is the only entity that can do studies. The main reason there are no studies is because schools don't have armed security guards in the US, except for a select few you have patrolling sheriff deputies (which hardly count), and maybe some extremely high crime rate areas like Chicago who have stationed officers. You can't compare these two groups because one barely even exists.
    – Clay07g
    Feb 25, 2018 at 17:12
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    @Coomie: Some schools perceive that they are at higher risk of attacks (especially from outside the school community), so they post armed guards. Examples from Australia. Because they had a higher risk of attack than most schools before posting armed guards, we can't generalise any data about attacks on those schools to unarmed schools. A randomised trial would address the question, but is unlikely to have been carried out.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Feb 28, 2018 at 2:58
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    @Coomie: But just as detectives go to scenes in response to crime, armed guards are placed at schools in response to threats and violence. Schools with guards almost certainly have more problems than those without (as predicted by Bayes' Rule), but the strong correlation doesn't prove causation. The problem is the selection bias.
    – Ben Voigt
    Feb 28, 2018 at 7:43

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