I think your view of this is that we’re going to take the average teacher and stick a gun in their hand. Most of the actual proposals / discussion I see are around letting teachers with CCW permits carry in their class. These people already carry all over town, in their car, in the grocery store, at the movie theater, out at a restaurant, etc. Oftentimes, CCW permit holders will practice regularly and / or seek out additional training above and beyond the required minimum to obtain a permit. It’s a self-selecting group of people that already by-and-large exercise appropriate judgement when handling their firearms and dealing with confrontation. No, they’re not perfect, but then neither are the police or anyone else. In a pinch, when someone is trying to murder their students, they’re probably better than nothing, more often than not.
It’s a dig at that gun control group that was pushing that phoney statistic about how many school shootings there have been this year. One of the incidents they counted was when a third-grader pulled the trigger on a police gun while the officer was sitting on a bench.
That may be the reality, but the argument (from Fox and others on the right) don’t seem to take that into account. It’s all “arm the teachers!” (except in all caps) like a knee jerk reaction. The point of this thread was to dissect that argument and explain some of the details the pundits don’t or can’t.
If this particular thread is any indication, then there’s not much else to go on. Because the pundits who shout “arm the teachers” either don’t know, or don’t care, that there are already some teachers around the country that are armed. And if that’s the case, let’s begin to gather those data in the areas where teachers are armed, and see if any connection can be made between CCW in schools and violence.
If only the NRA would allow the CDC to study gun violence…
You are mistaken. Neither the NRA, nor Congress are preventing the CDC from ‘study[ing] gun violence’. The only thing the Dickey Amendment prevented was spending money “to advocate or promote gun control”.
Perhaps the top of every desk should be Kevlar and Titanium. Hey, and put 3 shuriken under every desk. Obviously if the entire class is throwing shuriken at once, the guy with the gun is going to go down in a hail of flying, spinning blades, right?
This was my thought exactly, one police officer isn’t enough. Our local high school has approximately 2,000 students and is comparable to a small college. That also doesn’t take into account the number of faculty and support staff workers in the building at any given time.
But you did say “Then keep all guns out of schools.” Seeking to clarify here: did you mean that you want to see cops and security present, but without their guns? Or was “keep all guns out of schools” not intended to apply to guns in the possession of police officers?
Anyway, since you asked–
Do you remember the Amish school shooting back in 2006?
If I had been single-handedly responsible for public policy, I would have made it a requirement back then that at least 10% of teachers in each school be armed at all times.