“You would be looking for someone who is armed” seems to clash with “more reason to allow teachers to be armed”.
Anybody holding a gun during a shooting automatically becomes a target for everyone else holding a gun during a shooting. Bad guys’ll shoot at you, other “good guys with guns” will shoot at you, SWAT will shoot at you.
This whole Should We Arm Teachers discussion treats teachers like they are the pawns in our game. They’re not going to do anything they don’t want to do, and requiring them to be armed or to work alongside armed people will only give us fewer teachers.
Who is suggesting that they be required to be armed? The suggestion is that they be allowed to be armed, if they have a carry permit, complete whatever training is required, and want to do it. Not treat them like pawns at all, but as conscientious adults who can make their own decisions. Seems entirely reasonable to me.
But some (not you, or course) have suggested that they being armed would be a solution to the problem. This seems to ignore the fact that some adults who WERE armed and had a duty to act chose not to pursue the shooter. Some seem to think (again, not you) that having a gun would automatically give them nerves of steel.
There is something silly in the President’s ‘they are cowards’ rhetoric. He says that wouldn’t DARE attack a place where they might expect someone to return fire. I would counter that most school shooters, and most mass shooters, seem to be aware that they themselves are not likely to survive the incident.
In the early post-Columbine era the trained response was to get a four officer team and make entry. That changed pretty quickly. After all, how long would it take to get four officers together at the exact same location and make the move? Minutes (or longer) depending on the jurisdiction and how many people would be shot in the mean time? I asked the officers that I trained, “How long would you wait for back-up if your kid was in there?” When seconds matter, the cops are only minutes away. There has been much written about this topic but one thing that is widely accepted is that, once you make the gunman react to you, his focus changes from killing innocents to escaping, killing you or killing himself. Another theory posits that an active shooter will suffer from tunnel vision and be, relatively, tactically unaware. This may make it a bit easier to sneak up on him and end it. Going up against someone armed with an AR 15 or similar while armed with only a pistol is a losing proposition if they know you are there. Think about the length of school hallways. I don’t care if your are Jason Bourne, hitting a stationary target at 200’ with a handgun on the range isn’t easy. Add movement, adrenaline and all the other factors and its mostly luck. Swap that Glock for an AR and the odds are much better. Having a rifle locked in an office is useless but who wants cops armed with rifles patrolling our schools? The thing is, no one knows how they will react when the shit really hits the fan. It takes a certain mindset (the much maligned “warrior mentality”) to go charging in to a firefight. A cop would have to change from “least amount of force necessary” to “most amount of force possible” when it comes to stopping an active killer in a school. This is not an easy switch to flip and those who are likely to be the best are those who have been there and done that. That kind of experience is hard to come by. I’ll be critical of the officer who remained outside in Florida. He was, obviously, not the right man for the job. I’d like to think that I would have done things differently but who knows?
I could read only five or so lines, after that I started losing the right place when I tried to move to the next line. Pretty soon I just gave up and I have no idea what you were writing in the end.
That big amounts of text should be cut to chapters.
“Allowed” is where it starts. As I said elsewhere, “required” is the goal: education “has a liberal bias”, so once we get rid of the teachers who feel icky with a gun on their hip in class, the liberal bias will start to be “corrected”.
I will agree that most are cowards, in that they will take their own lives rather than face the people whose lives they have destroyed, but that sort of cowardice is not the sort that will protect our schools.
I don’t know what that has to do with anything. I make no reference to cowardice\bravery. Only that that the thought of armed response deters no one that is bent on a shooting. At some point, they know an armed response is coming. It is inevitable.
When Coral Springs police officers arrived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 in the midst of the school shooting crisis, many officers were surprised to find not only that Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, the armed school resource officer, had not entered the building, but that three other Broward County Sheriff’s deputies were also outside the school and had not entered, Coral Springs sources tell CNN. The deputies had their pistols drawn and were behind their vehicles, the sources said, and not one of them had gone into the school.
…
“What I saw was a deputy arrive … take up a position and he never went in,” Israel said at a news conference. Israel said Peterson should have “went in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer.” Peterson was suspended without pay, after which he resigned.
County Superintendent Robert Runcie said, “I’m in shock and I’m outraged to no end that he could have made a difference in all this. It’s really disturbing that we had a law enforcement individual there specifically for this reason, and he did not engage. He did not do his job. It’s one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever heard.”
…
Two days after the shooting, Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi addressed some of the concerns voiced by his officers in an internal email obtained by CNN that said, among other items, “I understand that another agency has given the impression that it had provided the majority of the rescue efforts, and that the tremendous work of the Coral Springs Police and Fire Departments has not been recognized. Please know that this issue will be addressed, …
It’s really disturbing that we had a law enforcement individual there specifically for this reason, and he did not engage. He did not do his job. It’s one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever heard.”
Dereliction of duty, what the military would call “cowardice in the face of the enemy”, etc.
Yeah. That was kind of stream of consciousness stuff and I apologize. I guess the bottom line is that there is no simple answer to any of this. Nothing new there. Sorry for the rambling post. I shouldn’t post when tired.
Well, they only had four guys, and as we all know, the only thing that an stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy… okay, four good guys… okay, some indeterminate number of good guys that is higher than four with a gun… okay, four guns… okay, some indeterminate… I’ll start again : As we all know, the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is more than four good guys with more than four guns. Hence the need for more guns.
Since they were apparently just waiting for the crazy guy to run out of bullets, did they really need four Deputies? If three armed LEO’s are enough to subdue a crazy guy who’s run out of ammo, shouldn’t the fourth have been out doing what Florida police are noted for? Killing unarmed and innocent motorists.
I think this is a logical end state of the LEO mindset that leads to most of the shootings listed in this thread: the number one priority of an officer is going home at the end of the day.
If “I was afraid” is sufficient to explain shooting an unarmed person, how is “I was afraid” not sufficient to explain not entering a building where you can hear actual gunfire?
Apologies to those LEOs who don’t use “I was afraid” as their standard for activity/inactivity.
ETA: and who says Cruz was crazy? Pissed off at the world and the school in particular, but labeling him crazy implies mental health improvements would have stopped this (and a lot of other) shootings. I’d suggest implying facts not in evidence, if I was a TV lawyer.
In a perfect world every LEO goes home every day. The perfect world would would have everyone of them make no mistakes and be honest in all they do. We don’t live in a perfect work, but the LEO should protect and serve and put the public first.