I would say the fact that it’s engineered to stay on target during rapid semi-auto fire via a buffer assembly that absorbs recoil that would otherwise be transferred to the shooter, combined with a 30-round magazine sets it apart. It’ll be much more effective than a rifle with, say, a 5-shot internal magazine and solid stock.
Bear in mind that routinely arming teachers is not something that Second-Amendment ideologues actually want society to do. It’s something that they want society to go on not doing, so they can go on advocating it as a hypothetically practical measure that’s hypothetically superior to better gun regulation.
If we actually did institute a policy of arming teachers, with predictably disastrous real-world results, the gun-rights ideologues would have lost one of their deflector shields against arguments for more regulation of guns. They don’t want that.
Utah allows law-abiding teachers to get a CCW permit and carry in school (and has done so for many years). The “predictably disastrous real-world results” have largely failed to materialize here. Why do you think that is?
I addressed this earlier. I can only tell you in my district, the board (mostly alt-right) started with a proposal to arm all teachers. Due to money concerns, they went down to volunteer teachers. Teachers will have to have a CCW permit( on their own dime), an approved firearm (ditto), CCW holster, etc., and get tested to see how they react to stress. They’ll get very limited training.
The proposal is up for a third reading but is a shoo-in. Nobody knows how many teachers will volunteer. The vast majority of teachers are opposed to the idea, and most own guns and are hunters. The feeling is the teachers most likely to volunteer are the Barney Fife types, and there are a few.
I don’t know how they’d coordinate with police. The cops just did a live scenario training exercise and looked good, but teachers weren’t involved.
That has been the case for what, 5-6 years now? And there are potentially hundreds of teachers that may be CCW’ing on campus?
Increase the number of carrying teachers by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and give it the hundreds or thousands of years that these teachers have to wait, armed, before they get their chance to repel an invader.
Spot on. The playbook seems to focus mainly on one tactic: deflect, deflect, deflect.
The faux concern about mental health is another example of this approach–and a particularly cynical one, as most conservative politicians are outraged by the very minor reforms of Obamacare. The idea that they would support an overhaul of the mental health system in the US, with the corresponding costs, is laughable. I would love to see some political will around improving mental health care in the US (not because of mass shootings, simply because the provisions are pathetic). But I’m not holding my breath.
But the subject is just another way for gun advocates to pretend there is some other solution. US citizens suffer from mental illness at similar rates to Europeans. So why do Americans shoot each other so often while Europeans don’t? I can’t begin to imagine where the problem might actually lie. . .
I guess we see that thread differently (I presume you are referring to the Kellerman Study thread about guns in the home). I guess you see a study with imperfections and declare it flawed.
I see “your side” finding a study whose conclusions do not support your worldview, picking apart its imperfections, declaring it flawed, and then asserting opposite conclusions based purely on gut feelings provided by the challenged worldview.
For example, the correlation/causation issue is NOT relevant to that paper. The paper acknowledged deficiencies (as all good papers should).
Basically, “your side” doing well there amounts to “I disagree, let me put my fingers in my ears, naaaa, naaaa ,naaa…”
Sorry about the “your side” thing, but you brought it up. Really, we are all on the same side here, aren’t we? Searching for truth, and all?
I never offered an estimate or number of teachers that I “suppose” are carrying (did I?), so how did you reach this conclusion?
There aren’t any good statistics on that precise matter that I’m aware of. Neither of us can know with certainty how many Utah teachers carry. We only know that it is a non-zero number.
Not really guesses, but I don’t have a cite really handy.
An article that someone else, I guess not you, pointed to, in one of these many threads that said, that, since the sandy hook shooting, hundreds of teachers have taken classes to be able to carry their gun in on school grounds in Utah.
If you are still interested, I can see if I can find it tomorrow.
I’m definitely interested, but let me clarify some things that might help you: There are general-purpose CCW classes offered all throughout Utah, and they have been for many years. Undoubtedly some number of the students of those classes are, in their day-jobs, teachers.
Aside from that, there have been some specialized classes, offered to school staff and educators (and eligible college students), often free of charge, in an effort to enable them to protect themselves and their schools. These have certainly become more popular in recent years, and they might well have had just “hundreds” of participants (personally I’d guess the total of these classes is in the thousands already - this one class scheduled for March 3 already has almost 600 signed up), but - and this is the important part - it would be a rather obvious mistake to conclude that only the participants in this latter group represent the sum total of all armed teachers in Utah.
As for your “5-6 years” guess, this CNN article from 2012 said: “For 12 years, Utah educators have been able to …”. That would put it at more like 18 years.
See I’m all for improving mental healthcare via Obamacare or some other way (I’m not well-versed in what other countries do) just for the sake of improving mental healthcare. I have friends and relatives with mental health challenges and our system really sucks for him. This is a much higher priority to me than trying to reduce school shootings, which as k9bfriender has pointed out to us are so vanishingly rare that they don’t warrant much policy attention.
I haven’t verified this fact sheet form NAMI but they’re saying 1 in 5 adults experience mental illness in a year. Mental Health By the Numbers | NAMI
Luck of the draw, I’d imagine. I don’t really think that a disturbed Utah schoolboy ever thought “ I can’t shoot up my own school, because Mr. Kelly has a gun. So I’ll go to Nevada and shoot up one of their schools.”
And although it wasn’t true at Parkland, it seems like most school shootings are also suicidal acts. if the shooter doesn’t get killed by the cops they usually kill themselves at the end. I don’t think there’s much of a deterrent factor at work.
Nope. That story is why I included the word “largely” in my post. That is the only incident I’m aware of in which a Utah CCW permit holding teacher had / caused a problem in a Utah school. One in ~18 years.
Now, you said “stories like this”. I know there were several stories written about it at the time it happened, so I suppose one could say there are “stories”, but are you aware of any additional incidents by CCW holders in Utah schools, or are you just referring to additional stories about this same one incident?
There are other stories, but not all of them I could find links for. Searching through newspaper databases there are stories like these below. Not all happened on campus or Utah, but they demonstrate teachers with CCW permits making mistakes: