In other words, deputies should just sit and wait until the SWAT team has set up a perimeter and the shooter has maximized his kill numbers.
The policy for dealing with an active shooter now is EXACTLY what you don’t find acceptable. So the deputies either do their duty or they should be liable to punishment. Or they don’t have to sign up in the first place.
Yup, and it’s a long ways from a “certain-death plan”. It’s increasingly common for police to be equipped with a “patrol rifle” of their own, for these sorts of situations. I have no idea what weapon the School Resource Officer or other Sheriff’s deputies had been issued, but even with pistols, 4v1 is a fight that heavily favors the deputies.
Where you and I live, we have easy access to the same kind of ‘assault weapons’ that Americans do. Handguns are more controlled, hut still relatively easy to get. There is a Cabelas down the street from me that has a wonderful selection of arms of all kinds. A one-day safety course is all that’s required to purchase as many as I want. And once you’ve done the safety course and get your Firearms certificate, you can buy as many rifles as you want, and they don’t have to be registered with the government or anything.
Per capita, Canadians have almost as many long guns as Americans, and yet ou don’t see the same kinds of shootings. This has less to do with gun control and more to do with the specific cultural differences between Canadians and Americans, and thr fsct thst Canada doesn’t have giant failing cities with inner-city disadvantaged populations shooting each other by the thousands each year.
As for handguns, The process is not that hard. The one-day training becomes two day, and there is a waiting period and you have to register your handguns, but you can own as many as you like, including military-style weapons.
In fact, not a single gun law in Canada would have stopped ANY of the school shooters had they been Canadian. They just would have had to jump through some extra hoops before amassing their arsenals. Background checks don’t matter if the shooters don’t have a criminal record or if they steal fhe weapons from friends or family. Limits on a specific type of gun like an AR-15 don’t matter when there are plenty of equally lethal alternatives available.
It seems to me that the U.S has big cultural problems, huge problems with their public school system, a 24/7 media fully willing to give the shooters the publicity they are looking for, etc. As even Michael Moore had to admit, “Guns don’t kill people - AMERICANS with guns kill people.”
Given that there are more than 300 million guns in America, and that outright gun bans/confiscation is never going to happen, perhaps it’s time to look at the uniquely American problems that amplify the dangers of guns and try to address those.
I thought one of the police calls to their home was for elder abuse? If so, and if it was him that did it, and not his also-committed to mental health hold sibling, then that’s an misdemeanor domestic/family violence offense that can deprive one of their right to buy a firearm.
'Course, they’d have had to arrest him at some point during those 50 or so calls… Sigh.
Just to punctuate the point, as the holder of a restricted license, I can drive down the street to Cabelas and pick up one of these Smith and Wesson AR-15 clones by plunking down $700 Canadian. I can walk out of the store with it and the government won’t even know I bought it.
Or, if I am poor student and ddon’t have a restricted license, instead I can spend $279 for a Russian SKS, which is another military-style rifle that actually fires a more powerful round than the AR-15.
You can also buy ammo for them in giant boxes of 500 rounds.
So if Canada doesn’t have as many shootings as the US, perhaps gun control isn’t the reason. Unfortunately, the real problems are bipartisan, complex, difficult, and don’t lend themselves well to the endless partisan bickering or media soundbite journalism.
Hello from Florida. I once made the mistake of calling the National Suicide Prevention Hotline to ask about grief counseling in my area. My wife did the deed. I Made it clear that I was just asking for info.
While i was still on the line with them, i was getting call-waiting beeps. Local cops showed up and offered me the two options of get in the front seat and take a ride to the hospital to be evaluated or ELSE!
I spent the night in a guarded hospital room only to be released by a nice Lady (Not sure of her credentials) early the next morning.
Four armed people hiding from gunfire is harder to understand, and it sounds like utter bullshit. It was probably the one guy who did not follow a policy of charging headlong into the line of fire. He’s not to blame for this, at the sound of gunshots people are already dead. The shooter is to blame for this. One asshole plus one gun.
One person hiding from gunfire I can understand. For one trained, armed person who knows the policy and deliberately bucks it, I have zero sympathy.
I’m going to bet you’ve never been in the military.
No, I haven’t, and neither have most LEOs. Military training is not relevant here.
You’re right when you associate US gun problems relative to Canada to be due in part to cultural differences, inner city crime, etc., but I don’t think you focus sufficiently on what those cultural differences are. I’ve often remarked on how similar the US and Canada are in socioeconomic terms, yet in the specific areas of guns and socialized universal health care, they are as different as night and day, a fact that seems to be correlated with a political system that is far to the right of any other first-world democracy.
It would be a mistake, first of all, to imply that Canada has anywhere near the number of guns per capita as the US – it’s less than one-third the number per capita, and almost all of them are ordinary long guns, neither handguns nor AR-15 type semi-automatics. The fact that you might be able to buy them after surmounting the obstacle of getting a restricted firearms license is not particularly relevant given a culture where very few people have any interest in getting either such a license or such a weapon. Moreover, the licensing requirement is in stark contrast to Florida where anyone can buy one in fifteen minutes.
Finally, I would say that your statement that I quoted is not representative of mainstream Canadian culture. I don’t know anyone who has any kind of firearms license or owns any kind of gun, and with the exception of a farmer I once visited when I was kid who let me shoot his .22 rifle, I never have in my entire life. I do, however, know people who, if I were to proudly show them a gun I owned, would walk out of the house and never associate with me again. That’s the difference in gun culture.
Never say “never”. It’s not going to happen as long as the gun culture is mainstream, but at one time cigarette smoking was mainstream, too – it seemed that virtually every adult was a smoker, and it would have been laughable to talk about banning smoking in public places. A great deal can be done about the gun problem through the same kinds of legal and cultural changes over time. As I understand it, Australia did it quite quickly after a particularly tragic mass shooting, instituting gun control measures that included a successful gun buyback program.
I don’t claim to have all the answers to what is a very complex problem, but I do know that doing nothing and letting the NRA dictate public policy, and pretending that mental health policy and turning schools into sinister armed fortresses is going to fix everything, is just a path to more tragedy.
It’s quite relevant to point of view. In the military, that ‘officer’ would have been court-martialed for dereliction of duty in a hot second.
Funny that you would blame the right for this, since not a single one of those cities has been governed by anyone other than Democrats for decades.
Semi-automatics are the most popular guns in the world - both in pistols and rifles. No, Canada doesn’t have a lot of AR-15’s - I think that’s a uniquely American thing due to its being the standard rifle in the U.S. military. But medium and high powered semi-automatic rifles with a detachable magazine? Extremely common.
‘Surmounting the obstacle’ consists of spending half a day in a classroom at Cabelas or another training location, followed by filling out a form.
In the states younstill heed to fill out the form and waitbfor a background check, so the only thing you avoid is the half day in a classroom. Sincevthat’s not a particular burden for a wanna be high school shooter, I’d say our laws are not what’s stopping them.
Does a background check only take 15 minutes in Florida? In any event, even if people had to wait a week, what difference would it make in school shootings? All the ones I can think of were not spur-of-the-moment decisions, but were planned out over a fairly long period of time. Nothing in Canada’s laws would have stopped any of them.
Has it occurred to you that you and your friends are the ones not representative of Canadian culture? Your statement reminds me of when the famous reporter Pauline Kael said, “I can’t belive Nixon won. No one I know voted for him!”
As you said, Canada has 1/3 the number of guns per capita as does the U.S. Since the U.S has more guns than people, that is a LOT of guns. So if you don’t know anyone who has a gun and your friends would disown you for owning one, that suggests to me that you and your friends are the outliers. And if your friends would disown you because you bought a gun, you need new friends. They sound like intolerant jerks.
Here in Edmonton, the least conservative city in Alberta and a stronghold of the NDP, the biggest problem for gun owners is finding a place to shoot them, as all our ranges and gun clubs are full beyond capacity. The Cabelas down the street has a very large section of the store devoted to gun sales, including a huge room containing nothing but handguns, and walls full of ‘assault weapons’. That wouln’t be the case if those guns were not selling like hotcakes. And there are three Cabelas in town. Canadian Tire has been forced to compete with them, and have now opened up their own ‘shooting sports’ sections with huge racks of guns of all kinds. They wouldn’t be doing that if people weren’t buying them.
As for anecdotal evidence - at least half the people I know own guns, as do I. I have friends with good-sized collections. A few years ago my software team completed a project early, and we had a team party - by consensus, the party was to go shooting handguns at West Edmonton Mall. Everyone had a blast, and no one was disowned or even shocked. Several of us already had guns at home. And software developers as a rule are not rednecks. And we’re all city dwellers. Go out to the small towns and farms, and you’ll have a hard time finding someone who doesn’t own a gun.
As for gun culture, it is strong enough in Canada that the firearms registry was met with widespread civil disobedience, with millions of guns not being registered as required by law. And the registry was never popular and no longer exists. We have actually liberalized our gun laws over the past decade, because the public wanted it that way.
The ‘legal regime’ that has to change is the Constitution of the United States. It is very clear, and has been set through multiple precedents that are going to be hard to ignore, that gun ownership is an individual constitutional right. If you haven’t noticed, gun laws have been going in the opposite direction from what you want.
It seems to me you have exqctly two choices if you want to regulate guns. The proper way is to change the culture by convincing enough people that you are right, then raising enough support for a constitutional convention where you can modify the second amendment to get what you want. Good luck with that.
The other way is to wait until two Constitutional justices leave the court, and hope that it happens while Democrats control all branches of government with veto-proof majorities. Then you can install judges who will decide gun control or gun bans are constitutional. After that, you can deal with the possible civil insuurection that will inevitably occur when you go through the ‘flyover’ states and start trying to confiscate their guns. Then you can hope that the judges who found a ‘creative’ interpretation of the second amendment don’t turn their creative talents towards other constitutional rights, such as free speech or the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
Since none of this is ever likely to happen, there is a third option: you can use every episode of gun violence as an excuse tomcall the ‘other’ side names, demonize hated political entities, hand-wring and virtue signal to fellow members of your own tribe, and in general use the violence as yet another wedge in the never-ending political struggle between right and left.
I don’t think anyone has a plan to ‘fix everything’. I don’t think it’s possible in a nation of 330 million people to ‘fix everything’. There are just various ineffective or maybe partially effective tools that might make small differences here or there. Even banning every gun in existence won’t ‘fix everything’. The largest school mass murderer in U.S history did not use a gun.
As for things that could be done that are actually constitutional and might make a difference:
A common theme with many school shootings is bullying. These kids get harassed and bullied at school, get no help from indifferent teachers, and eventually snap and take matters into their own hands. Let’s figure out what to do to improve that.
Another common theme is fame. These shooters know that if they kill a bunch of kids in a school, all of America will soon know who they are. You can blame 24/7 national media for for that - something else we don’t have in Canada.
American culture is partly to blame, but it’s not ‘gun culture’. It’s reality TV that glorifies people doing horrible things to each other. It’s sports stars who make touchdowns and then run over and sneer in their opponent’s faces. It’s ‘thug life’ and the glorification of ‘gangsta’ lifestyles. It’s 24/7 news blaring the names of shooters and interviewing everyone who knew them. It’s the culture that arises in inner cities where hopelessness and despair rule, and escape nearly impossible because the system forces kids to go to failed schools and the dads are locked up on drug offences because of an idiotic drug war.
But most importantly, it’s the schools. If I could change one thing about America that I think would have the largest impact for the poor, it would be to scrap the stupid idea that you MUST go to the school in your local area. We don’t do that in Canada. Our kid was free to choose any public school in Edmonton. The only thing we lost by taking him out of our local neighborhood school was free bus fare.
In the states, when an inner-city school fails the response is typically to either ignore it, or throw more money at it, which does nothing. In Canada, if a school is failing, the parents pull their kids out and we shut down the school.
Time and time again you see this pattern in the U.S. - a school goes downhill. The parents with means pack up and move, and in the meantime other middle class families look at the school’s results and choose not to move to that neighborhood. Over time, property values decrease, more middle class people leave, the school gets even worse, the good teachers leave, the school gets even worse… And before you know it, you have another neighborhoos full of crime and violence and a school that can’t even teach the kids how to read properly, meaning the cycle of poverty and violence continues.
Unfortunately, this simple change will likely never happen. It will be opposed by the teacher’s unions, by racists who don’t want minority kids escaping from their neighborhoods, By property owners in the neighborhoods with the best schools who don’t want to see them watered down by having ‘unworthy’ children join them, etc. Huge NIMBY-ism, but if you could make that change I think it would have a huge impact not just on gun violence, but poverty and violence in general.
Oh, and put an end to the stupid drug war so that poor minority kids stop shooting each other in the streets.
The biggest reason these things won’t be done? They don’t fit into nice partisan pigeon-holes that make them useful in the endless, tedious war between the right and the left. There are people on the right and left who will oppose it. There’s no one to champion it.
Which political party has historically and consistently opposed gun control? Which political party is the almost exclusive beneficiary of NRA money and political support? And on health care, which political party consistently opposes any government involvement in health care, government regulation of health care or anything else, and considers government-run health insurance to be the epitome of socialistic evil? Which political party did Reagan represent when he vigorously campaigned against Medicare in the early 60s?
I rest my case. And I don’t see what municipal governments have to do with any of this.
I don’t know what Cabelas is. I would have no idea how to go about getting any kind of firearms certificate, or what I would do with it if I had one. There is no one I could ask because no one I know has any idea, either, or any interest in the matter. As compared with walking into a gun store that all your friends told you about, and walking out fifteen minutes later with an AR-15 and 500 rounds of ammo, that’s an obstacle. I do not subscribe to the idea that Canada doesn’t have a lot of mass shootings or gun violence because we don’t have mental illness (we definitely do, and it’s usually not handled well) or because we’re somehow angelic.
No, that has not occurred to me. And it’s not just my friends. There was someone in a large organization where I used to work who was known to own handguns and belong to a shooting club, which I believe is a condition of a handgun license. When I say “known to own handguns”, that should be read in the same spirit as “known to be a convicted felon”; that is, there were a lot of whispered suggestions that he was a strange bird indeed. You seem to run in a completely different social milieu than me, and I suppose that’s Alberta for you – Canada’s Texas. 
To me this is just evidence of what a small number of activist gun nuts can do. Kudos to the province of Quebec for standing up to them and going ahead with their own gun registry.
“Clear”? Yeah, the 2nd amendment is so damn clear that Constitutional scholars have been arguing about it for a hundred years, and the Supreme Court had been dodging the issue for most of the 20th century until a bunch of right-wing lunatics headed up by Scalia suddenly decided that, hey, they knew exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote that. And in particular, Scalia and the other nutbars had managed to magically divine that when the authors of the Bill of Rights began the 2nd amendment with the words, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State”, they were just kidding. Despite the fact that so many previous drafts and contemporaneous commentaries reference military service and militias defending the nation, those words must be regarded just as decoration, and should be ignored. :rolleyes:
You make it sound so complicated, but all that’s really needed is for another case to come up before a soundly constituted Supreme Court, and not one populated with right-wing gun nuts.
You don’t think our current Supreme Court is “soundly constituted”?
Well, lessee …
There’s Clarence Thomas, who, as the standing embarrassment to the Court, needs no introduction.
There’s John Roberts, probably the brightest of the Gang of Four, who engineered the ploy to re-argue the Citizens United case and greatly expand its scope, turning it into a blanket endorsement of unlimited political spending, and then proclaimed that he didn’t see any potential for money to corrupt politics so it was all just fine. And who agreed with Scalia that the “well regulated militia” preamble to the 2nd amendment was just decoration and could be ignored. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty remarkable position for an alleged strict constructionist to take, who is supposed to regard every word of the text as sacred. Except, of course, words they don’t like.
There’s Sam Alito, who sided with Roberts on CU and Heller and mouthed off against President Obama right in the middle of the State of the Union.
Scalia, alas, is no longer with us to disparage. But the good news for right-wingers is that his replacement, Neil Gorsuch, may very well turn out to be the most far-right nutcase of the whole lot! Hell, he might be so nutty that he could even make Scalia look like a moderate in comparison!
So, no, I don’t.
I think you’re conflating the separate issues of inner city gun violence and mass shootings. The urban kids have drugs and handguns, your spree shooter is usually a white loner with a grievance - hate for black people (Roof), can’t get women (Rodgers), lost money (Vegas guy) - and they’re going to make others pay for it. Poverty does not define these people. The weapons and their calculated acts make them a type.
Oh well then.
Mental healthcare is important, but stripping rights from depressed and anxious people is both wrong and counterproductive. Nearly one third of the country has taken psychiatric meds at some point, which means there’s probably another third with undiagnosed mental illness of some kind. You can’t go restricting gun ownership from two thirds of the population, all you’ll do is drive mental illness into the closet again and discourage diagnosis and treatment. While I agree we need to improve mental healthcare in this country, that’s not the solution to this particular problem.
This seems to me like a solved problem, really. When the President was shot, they increased security precautions and added more armed guards to his Secret Service detail. They stopped using convertibles and hardened the President’s vehicles with bulletproof doors and glass. When our convoys in Iraq were targeted, they added more armor to humvees. When police feel threatened, they are given more guns, more armor and more training. When banks got robbed, they hired more security guards. They transfer their money in armored cars accompanied by armed guards. Arms. Armor. And the training to use them properly. This is how we defend the things we care about.
It’s clear we need to increase school security. As cheaply as possible, because there are thousands of schools in this country. But beefing up security is how you guard against violent attacks by unpredictable lone terrorists, not calling your congressman from your easy chair.
Frankly, I think arming teachers is a batshit crazy idea, if by that you mean “put guns in the hands of untrained individuals and add yet another high stress duty to their job description for no extra pay”, but if you mean “let people who already own weapons and have training carry them at school” it starts to sound like a no brainer. If you’re legally granted a license to carry in public crowds on the street already, why shouldn’t you be allowed to carry at work?
Retrain the useless half of the TSA roster for school security and get rid of gun free zone signs, hire more security guards, maybe throw in a few metal detectors and harden the buildings as much as we can, and I think we’re off to a great start at fixing this problem. It takes effort, work, and money, and it will take time, but it’s far better than wringing our hands doing nothing. I’m not talking about turning schools into armed fortresses. I’m talking about being proactive when it comes to defending our children.
Sitting around with signs and chants, asking people at the capitol to change words on paper will not fix this. And there are 100 million rifles in this country, but less than 300 people total are killed by a rifle in a given year, so it’s pretty obvious that a rifle ban is a non-starter, even before considering the political climate around gun control. One side saying “there is no acceptable answer except gun control!” and the other side saying “mental health is the real issue here!” is predictable and lame. We need to take action, as a community, to defend our neighbors and families from violence. No one is going to help us but ourselves.