Come on! US Army Ranger Training School is only eight weeks and they even have two summer sessions. For educators we could probably even eliminate Basic Airborne Course and Jumpmaster pre-reqs. Don’t you care enough about teaching to spend your summer learning small unit tactics in mountain and jungle warfare? We’re not in the business of producing frail child education specialists who aren’t going to survive their first encounter with a rogue third grade paramilitary unit or a middle school guerrilla clique; we need to provide teachers with the skills to survive on the modern classroom battlefield in the morning math class, afternoon recess, or the hazardous duty assignment afterschool detention, not to mention TDY on school trips with a bunch of rambunctious infidel teenagers on at a debate tournament or science fair.
Right. These extracurricular murders are really something that public schools should be provided as part of the on-campus curriculum to prepare students for the ‘real world’ of the post-apocalyptic ultraviolent future of America. Anthony Burgess has nothing on us.
Why do you think there are so few shootings at airports? Because everyone is packing. The bad guys with guns know that the place is crawling with armed good guys. Connect the dots, people!
As a “tactical firearms instructor”, what exactly did you teach your students to do when confronted with violent assault? Whip out their cell phones and lobby the government for more gun control?
A person with your credentials should know that a “safe room” is simply a pre-designated muster point, preferably with delaying attributes where the defender can gain the upper hand. Granted, I haven’t been to school for a long time, but I think classrooms still have doors.
Your proposed alternative strains credulity, given that we already tried an “assault weapons” ban in this country, and it didn’t work. To a person with your level of firearms knowledge, the answer should be simple: The problem is one of armed vs. defenseless, not slightly less well-armed vs. defenseless. See the Virginia Tech (handguns) and Cumbria, England (.22 rifle, double-barreled shotgun) for example.
Ignoring temporarily your false equivalency statement (the United States has a homicide rate slightly the middle of all nations, all of whom have stricter gun control), the negative impact to freedom and America’s core principles, and near-impossible problem of enforcement,realistically, you’d have to extend your desired weapons ban to all but the most primitive types to achieve the desired results.
Convincing some Americans to a support a ban on near undefinable “assault weapons” by exaggerating the power of their cartridges, confusing their fire rate with fully-automatic weapons, and claiming their potential for mass killing is orders of magnitude above other gun types is clearly possible (see this message board for proof.) But once a ban on that type of weapon doesn’t work, you’ll have to keep going down the list until you are asking Americans to give up .22 pistols and side-by-side shotguns. And that’s simply not going to fly.
Great, yet another shitbird trying to undermine the content by attacking the credentials because I differ from the hardline NRA position that any attempt at regulating firearms ownership is akin to authoritarian dictatorship.
As a tactical firearms instructor, I taught students basic tactical shooting and positioning, ran through rapid fire and stress shooting drills, and provided practical guidance about avoiding conflict and dealing with the serious legal consequences of a defense shooting, even if completely justified. I also reminded them that actual combat is different than even the best shoothouse simulation, that firearm injuries are often serious and life-altering events even if they aren’t lethal, and that even the most powerful handgun is a pretty marginal weapon compared to any centerfire rifle, and is basically a weapon that allows you to fight to an exit or a better gun. I also occasionally had students who were not firearm enthusiasts and were pressured by spouses or others into taking a tactical shooting course. They were never very dedicated or disciplined, and clearly wouldn’t have done very well in an actual firefight. I can’t imagine that mass training and arming of school teachers, the majority of whom have little interest in shooting, would be particularly effective and would inevitably result in increased liability of keeping a weapon accessible that most non-gun enthusiasts would rather avoid.
A “safe room” is a secure room with controllable access points (e.g. secure, difficult-to-breech doors and windows) and supplies to wait out an assault. Classrooms are typically designed with not-particularly-secure unreinforced doors and jams with a simple masterkeyed in-knob lock, often with sidepanel windows with minimal reinforcement. Most classrooms are well-suited to defensive positioning and aside from the typical cinderblock walls do not have much in the way of effective cover.
You’ll note, despite your attempt to assign specific claims and motivations to me, that I didn’t present any detailed plans to ban nebulously-defined “assault weapons” or weapons with cosmetic ‘tactical’ features. In fact, I don’t think a broad gun ban is politically or practically feasible in this country; however, laws making the purchase of new weapons have to go through more rigor than a simple background check and filling out ATF Form 4473 would at least provide some opportunity for some level of evaluation. The vast majority of industrialized nations have a variety of legal requirements to be satisfied in order to own firearms and do not experience anything close to the rate of mass shootings as the US, which can be attributed at least in part to the less-than-ready access to firearms suitable for such action. Most also do not have the degree of socioeconomic inequality and underpinning of social and racial injustice, which are also issues that have to be addressed, but despite the truism that “Guns don’t kill people; people with guns kill people,” it is also true that “People who don’t have guns don’t shoot people.”
As for “the negative impact to freedom and America’s core principles”, let’s not lose sight of the fact that some of those other core principles included human slavery and limitation of voting rights to landed white men, which are ‘core principles’ we’ve moderated as we’ve come to accept expansion of rights and in recognition of what those limitations do to our development and maturity as a society. Italians do not drink leaded wine as their Roman ancestors do, the British no longer accept divine right of kings, and we can acknowledge that unrestricted firearms ownership does not make for an inherently polite society.
You don’t have to arm teachers and force them into training, you just need to stop disarming teachers (and other school personnel) and allow those who choose to train and carry the opportunity to do so.
No need to arm all or a majority of teachers; just take away the certainty that the shooters targets are all defenseless.
Mass shootings do not happen in places where some people might be carrying guns. The nut jobs either avoid those places or they get stopped before their shooing become a mass shooting.
Hmmmm. Here’s an idea (not saying it’s any good, just - an - idea). We see how TSA does it at the airports. Maybe an ESD (Education Security Administration)? Federalizing school security is obviously going be stupid expensive and inefficient, right? But what if States and Municipalities took this same viewpoint and approach - because it is after all, exactly the same problem - just distributed at many more smaller locations across the country. Where are the metal detectors? This is not rocket surgery.
The problem is not everybody is attending schools, while far more are liable to get on an airplane, including guess who?
Government Officials
This problem gets better quicker if all the indignant backlash get directed at the people responsible for school security. While nobody remains responsible for the criminally insane, this is the other biggest facet of the problem.
As an afterthought (because I try not to waste time thinking about stupid ideas), arming teachers is a BAD idea.
Based on your extensive background in firearms and self-defense training, please examine the following scenario:
An armed assailant is attempting to force his way through a door into a room such as you have described. There is a shitbird inside. The assailant does not know the position of the shitbird, but the shitbird does know the position of the assailant, as he his forcing the door.
Is is the shitbird and his students more likely to survive this assault if he’s armed with a handgun, or completely unarmed?
I gotta say, I think some people are a little harsh to berate the officer that didn’t go inside to stop the shooter. On the guy in charge who’s paid to have a plan, maybe less so.
All of this should serve as a reminder, as the courts have ruled, that police have no duty to protect individuals, even if they get there in time. And even if they did, who’s gonna make them? When the waste hits the fan, you’re pretty likely on your own, Pookie.
I’d much prefer to be standing there with a pistol and a chance, rather than just a cell phone and a girl-scream.
I basically agree with that, though would clarify that the purpose would be to find policies which could somewhat reduce the threat of these shootings without doing more harm in some other way. It would not be a ‘solution’. There isn’t a ‘solution’ per se starting from where we are, not a realistic one in any but a very long time from now.
I expect some localities will start to allow defense plans which include volunteer armed teachers. I don’t expect a requirement that all teachers or even some teachers in every school be armed. Then over time there will be some indication of whether this helps. Though of course some people in the trenches on either side of the divide have already decided it will or won’t help and will be impervious to evidence either way.
And with due respect to them, I don’t take as definitive the opinions of people declaring themselves experts on the topic. They often set up an artificial model where the shooter is determined and resourceful enough to get around imperfect obstacles. Actually both entrenched sides often assume this. Less than super hero mass shooters might get around knowing some teachers might be armed, as they might get around any at all likely in the US changes to gun control laws (some have already gotten around state gun laws more strict than US federal ones are ever likely to be IMO, some have already gotten around armed ‘good guys’ close by who cowered and did nothing), That doesn’t mean either measure wouldn’t deter or wrong foot some of them.
I see two problems with that (almost verbatim in various posts on various threads here) kind of response
1 It compares a desired end point, ‘never gain access’, to a specific policy proposal ‘allow teachers/districts to include arming volunteer teachers as part of their defense plan’.
It seems to assume mutual exclusivity, which gets back to point 1. If there was an actual realistic policy whereby ‘perps never gain access’…but there isn’t one. There are only feasible (in US conditions) gun control policies (including ‘mental health and guns’ type) which might somewhat reduce the likelihood school shooters would get guns or particular types of guns. IOW in the real world there’s no mutually exclusivity practically, only ideologically.