Suppose it were your job to come up with a strategy, whether it be new legislation, new policies, etc. to prevent school shootings (or, if you’re feeling ambitious, mass shootings in general). Saying “People will always kill people; there’s not much we can do” isn’t an option; it’s your job to come up with the best solution that you can, flawed though it may be. You should respect the right to bear arms to whatever degree you think it deserves to be respected (i.e., I want to hear gun-rights advocates’ opinions as well as gun-control advocates’).
Obviously I’m thinking about what happened today in Connecticut, but I’m trying to talk more generally.
How free do you want society to be? You can make it a lot harder for weapons to enter a school with prison style security–limited access points, metal detectors, etc–but that carries a cost both monetary and political.
I’m not saying it would prevent all or even most shootings, but allowing concealed-carry permit holders employed by the school to carry on the job would help. Designating schools as gun-free just means the shooter knows he won’t encounter resistance until the police arrive, which is plenty of time for his evil purposes. No one who is willing to break the moral and legal restrictions to murder would be deterred by also breaking a gun-free school zone law.
We need to crack down on guns and gun carrying. Want a rifle or shotgun to hunt deer? Fine. Want one revolver to keep at home to guard against intruders? Well, the odds are slim that you’ll ever use it for that purpose, but they should be registered and licensed like cars, and their ownership traced. Think you need a gun that fires 100 rounds in a minute? Forget about it- you DON’T.
The shooters you’re tying to stop don’t care about the laws. Those who are licencsed to carry are not the mass shooters.
And with speed loaders, even a revolver is capable of over 100 rounds a minute.
See U.S. Constitution, Amendment #2. Of course, you already knew that. The political will to change that simply does not exist, and appears extremely unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future.
How free do you want it to be? I’m hoping people will answer according to their own feelings. I’m sure there are some people on the most-extreme pro gun-control side who would say “Let’s just outlaw all sale and possession of guns, and confiscate them whenever we find them”. But I’m more interested in whether people who are at least somewhat pro-gun ownership have an idea of how to tackle this that they would actually find acceptable. Or is it just “it’s rare enough that we’re willing to live with it”?
Or any shootings. While “gun free” zones could be said to create defenseless targets, there are always going to be placed where people don’t generally carry guns for one reason or another and people who have the idea to shoot a bunch of people are going to go to those places. If there are no gun free zones then maybe once in a while one of these things will take place in a circumstance where someone has a gun and is in position to help, but I don’t think that’s much of a solution here. We need much better care for people who are deeply mentally ill and prone to violence, we need to make it much more difficult for people with severe mental illness to get weapons, particularly weapons that make it easy to kill large numbers of people.
Until the infamous Heller misinterpretation by the right wing Court, the “right” to be armed was contingent on being part of a “well-regulated” militia. The National Guard has a right to weaponry. You don’t.
Of course not everyone interprets the 2nd Amendment in a way that prohibits what BobLibDem is talking about. But “What is the right way to interpret the Constitution?” isn’t really the question I’m trying to raise here.
What would you propose, within the confines of the Constitution as you interpret it?
So the solution to guns in the schools is more guns in the school! Brilliant.
The real solution is to interpret the 2nd amendment in its 18th century context and institute real meaningful gun conrol in this country. Or decide how many dead second graders we’re willing to trade for the right to wear a glock strapped to our hip in the local shopping mall.
So, let’s talk specifics. Would you support a nationwide system where you needed a license to buy or possess a firearm, and making the issuing of that license contingent on some kind of mental health evaluation? “Demonstrate you’re not crazy before you can have a gun”?
I know lots of people would balk at that, but I’m struggling to think of how else we can effectively keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
The bottom line is that any meaningful gun control in the United States is blocked by the Constitution. If you want to prevent school shootings, the first step is to repeal the Second Amendment.
We’re discussing a hypothetical here and the list of options shouldn’t be trimmed to make the case look better. You can’t take it for granted that eliminating gun free zones would stop shootings. Do all of these mass shootings happen in such zones? I don’t think so.
I’m no security expert. I don’t even like the idea that most schools even in my rural area have a “Safety Officer” assigned to them. In this state, said Safety Officer is armed, and that’s something…but in many cases, the role is filled by someone who is…shall we say…not well suited for handling an actual emergency of this nature.
There’s always a trade off between security and freedom. If I had kids, I would not want them strip searched before entering a school secured behind barbed wire fences with machine gun towers with overlapping fields of fire. Yet that environment would put a stop to incidents of this nature.
I think it’s a royal pain in the ass to get into a federal courthouse these days. Some require removing shoes, belts, emptying pockets all before going through a metal detector. Those buildings are pretty secure, once you get inside. But that costs a lot of money.
Hell, I don’t know what the answer is. School is a very different place than it was when I was that age. Our high school security was a bunch of nuns and Brothers (like nuns, sorta, but male) armed with rulers and paddles. We didn’t have shit like this going on. These days…that does not appear to be enough.