anyone with a realistic proposal?
No. It isn’t realistic. Therefore, I’d like a bazooka.
Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out.
Although, I can see how some may object on grounds of separation of church and state.
SWAT is already armed and trained to deal with armed people in schools. There wouldn’t be any change in tactics or weapons. I would hate to be the teacher though.
Absolutely unrealistic. Total nonsense.
USA has much higher murder rate that Canada and UK where guns are almost banned.
Tom Berenger used a 9mmP S&W Sigma pistol and full sized Uzi submachinegun woth Sionics suppressor in The Substitute. So, in the world of exploitation fims headed by C-list actors, these are the weapons of choice.
In the real world where gunshots aren’t squibs and dead people don’t return as a different character in the sequel, we might want to put a little bit more about how to keep weapons out of schools rather than how to put more in them.
Stranger
IMO, we need to put most of the effort into the mental health field.
Guns are lazy and won’t get off their butts and go shoot people all by themselves.
Solid, lockable doors would be my first choice.
I was going to say heavy metal, locking doors. And metal desks too!
They have armed teachers in Israel. What do they use?
In my day, a ruler across the knuckles was weapon enough, by golly!
On a less smart-ass note, all of a sudden, I’m glad my daughter has decided she doesn’t want to teach any longer. She’s a really good teacher, but she doesn’t need to be dealing with this type of crap. She has had enough to deal with between lesson plans, idiotic non-academic requirements, parents who don’t care, parents who don’t believe their angel isn’t perfect, and spending her weekends grading and planning without adding weapons and tactics added to the mix.
Personally, in such a situation I plan to explain the Epsilon-Delta definition of the limit. That usually works to pacify my students. If the gunman persists, I will instead assign him a problem to approximate the area under the curve of f(x)=x^3 using a Riemann sum with 2000 subintervals. Calculator is not allowed.
If the violent individual hasn’t given up at that point, I’ll make him find an elementary antiderivative for f(x)=e^(x^2).
School defense should probably share many of of the same elements as home defense, including (as mentioned above) hardening the target and a defensive plan.
I’d start with perimeter security: Fences, limited access points, etc.
Internally, classrooms should all be analogous to the safe room in your house, with a lockable, preferably solid, door. (I think most interior school doors are already solid, but I could be mistaken.)
In the event of an intrusion, gather your family (or students), retreat to the safe room, lock the door, then take a defensive position with your weapon pointed at the door. The defender has the advantage of position and preparedness. Wait for the police. Anyone that forcibly comes through the door gets shot.
School teachers aren’t movie characters, as noted. But neither are mass shooters. Normal techniques apply. Firearms have become the indisputable top choice weapon for personal defense worldwide because (surprise) they’re good for defending oneself.
The type of gun won’t matter much. In a confrontation between an armed person and an unarmed person, the odds are pretty much 100% in favor of the armed person, regardless of the type of gun. If both people are armed, other factors like preparedness and position are far more important than the type of gun.
Anyone see those YouTube videos where teachers go berserk in class, screaming at the kids? Yeah, tell me arming those teachers will stop the killing.
I’ll bet a dagger could be fashioned to reside within the body of a ruler. Or a samurai sword within a yardstick for the more ninja-nun.
This but I’m am far less sure armed teachers are that great of an idea. Back when I was teaching eons ago I saw several fellow teachers basically lose it and I remember a couple from my student days; I’m not sure I want any of them having guns. If they do I want very strict standards and training over and above what most civilians have; possibly even higher than most law enforcement have. And very clear laws on their control and responsibility of that firearm and having it around children.
Curiously, the inevitable claims after mass shootings that the problem is a “mental health issue” are never followed up by, say, enthusiastic expansion and public funding of public mental health services or training of peace officers in behavioral evaluation and intervention of potentially violent students or other individuals, and notwithstanding that no amount of available mental health services would have been likely to prevent a determined mass shooter like Stephen Paddock. Nor have other nations which do not have frequent mass shootings dealt with with mass violence strictly in terms of public health, although to be fair, most industrialized nations also have some form of government-sponsored or provided universal health care including mental health services. But…American exceptionalism, fuck yeah!
Having been a tactical firearms instructor, worked in the home and personal security field, and a student of a variety of martial arts forms, as well as an enthusiast in all things technical about how weapons work, from the personal to strategic, I have to ask: do you realize how ridiculous it sounds to expect schools to rebuild classrooms to ‘safe room’ integrity or arm and drill teachers in defensive tactics to deal with a problem that other countries don’t experience in a frequency even approaching the order of magnitude of American society? Teachers bear enough responsibilities and many schools are financially strapped as it is without levying the obligation to become defensive fortresses notwithstanding the liability for requiring teachers to carry and secure firearms in a safe but accessible fashion in schools. If your objective is to convince many qualified and enthusiastic educators that public schools are not the place where their talents are best utilized, then mission accomplished. Otherwise, maybe we should be looking at addressing the core problem of why the United States is uniquely prone to mass shootings in all of the industrialized world, even of nations with comparable degrees of firearms ownership.
Look, a stalling action is all well and good from a strictly tactical standpoint but actually dealing with the underlying socioeconomic issues behind school violence requires thinking about longer term solutions, such as the Hodge Conjecture or Pompeiu Problem. If that doesn’t stop a shooter in his tracks, require they present a canonical explanation of Kronecker coefficients which describe the decomposition of tensor products of irreducible representations of a symmetric group into irreducible representations. That will jam up even a Russian-built AK-47, and will foul the direct impingement system of an AR pattern rifle like wet cement dust.
Stranger
Folks that want me trained: when?
Should I get weapons training in my planning period, instead of making copies and grading papers and tidying the room and analyzing student performance?
Should I get it in the afternoon, instead of meeting with colleagues to engage in long-term planning or the logistics of field trips?
Should I get it on Saturdays, instead of getting to spend time with my family?
How much training?
As for the classroom: given that you can’t optimize anything for two different purposes, to what degree should we degrade a classroom’s instructional utility in order to make it a better saferoom? Lots of windows are less secure, but provide more natural light. Several doors are less secure, but allow easier movement around the school. Leaving doors unlocked is less secure, but means I don’t need to stop a lesson every time a kid comes back from the bathroom. Windows on doors are less secure, but mean that administrators can see what’s going on in a room even if the door is closed.
Should we get rid of all these functional classroom features in order to keep from having to address the firearm in the living room?
Hand gun … any will do … just having the guns on school campus will divert some shooters to a softer target … not that this is an improvement since most children are murdered off-campus …
We can fence off our airports, we can fence off our schools … just a matter of priorities …