in the 70’s, when I was in HS, there were 2 big racially based mini-riots, yrs apart…lots of kids hurt, massive intimidation.
The city approved - without a vote - providing full time armed police at the school…they were referred to as Liaison Police.
They were even included in the HS yearbook. So were the tiny eavesdropping microphones they planted in the hallway ceilings. Not one parent complained about civil rights being violated, or invasion of privacy by big brother…they were too busy enjoying a once again peaceful school environment.
PS the fighting & intimidation ceased…and that was yrs before the avg Joe had, or had access, to assault rifles. No weapons were involved in any of the fights.
I saw in the news last week, a US Marine, with prior city & school approval, volunteered to stand guard at the main door, in uniform, at the school his kids attended. Not one complaint was mentioned.
Arming teachers is a ridiculously stupid thing to do. I was a previous teacher and it’s just a ridiculously stupid idea. It’s LAUGHABLY bad. You are practically begging for your gun to get stolen, or for other students to bring their own guns. Also… there are so many teachers who I wouldn’t trust with a gun that it’s scary.
Assuming that the UK is in line with most of Western Europe, your legal remedy is to run or retreat to a safe place, call 999 (UK) or 112 (most Europe) and wait for assistance.
If you use your gun on the attacker, all your guns will be confiscated, your license will be temporarily withdrawn and you will face a mandatory manslaughter charge. If you are able to prove in court that shooting the intruder was the only viable alternative to a real or reasonably perceived threat to your life, you will be acquitted and your gun license will be restored.
And don’t even ask about licenses for open or concealed carry of handguns for self defense purposes. In practice and for 99.9% of the population, we just don’t have that kind of things.
It’s already being done. And if you used your former teaching skills to read what I posted you’d know that the gun would be concealed which means it’s not in a position to be stolen. I also said there should be the same screening and training process that an FBI agent would go through.
Dead children are not a laughing matter and placing them in a guaranteed gun-free zone paints a huge target on them. They are guaranteed fish in a barrel waiting for the next nut-job to come along. The only reason there were not more killed was the arrival of the police.
Well for starters tasers only work if they make contact. And even then they are often not effective. At best it puts the user in front of someone with a weapon that IS effective. But yes, in the future there may be a decent defensive weapon that can be used which is not lethal.
And no kid is ever going to figure out which teachers are carrying? Right. And will teachers who flunk FBI training not be allowed to teach? And will they be forced to retrain every year? And do combat simulations, because I think shooting at targets won’t mean shit in a real situation.
First, what is more likely to happen - a teacher gets mad, takes out his or her gun, and shoots a principal or a student or a crazed psycho invades the school? I think the answer is pretty obvious. Plus, what is going to prevent the shooter from getting body armor like the Colorado theater shooter had? Is the teacher supposed to do a difficult head shot under fire? And, clearly, any shooter is going to go for the teacher first.
You just are going to get more students and more teachers killed with your John Wayne bullshit. If this asshole couldn’t fire so many rounds so quickly, a lot fewer people would have gotten killed.
It’s been more than 40 years since I graduated, but thinking about my high school, an armed officer would be no guarantee. It was a 3-story building, plus wings for the gym, the wood/metal shops, the cafeteria, and the auditorium/music rooms. How easy would it be for someone to set up a distraction (smoke bomb maybe?) and one end of the complex, then come in shooting at the other end? There could be a lot of bloodshed before the resident officer got to the right scene.
My daughter is a teacher - I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she quit rather than pack heat… She complains about the superfluous crap she has to do now anyway. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be at all excited at the prospect of spending more of her rare off-hours taking gun training.
When you say “implement this policy” - do you mean that it’s allowed? Or that it’s required? How many teachers in UT, KS and TX are actually carrying guns to school?
It’s being widely mocked, which is good, because it’s one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. I’m not sure the NRA was even being serious. I find myself wondering if they threw it out there to distract people.
Just an additional data point to illustrate what the current policy is in some schools.
We are a suburban town of around 60,000. In the high school there is a school resource officer. As stated above he is not a guard. He deals mostly with problems with the students and tries to stop problems before they have to go to juvenile court. The high school also has a number of unarmed security guards.
We also have a SRO for the middle schools. But he spends his time between the three schools and could be in any one of them. There is no one assigned to the elementary schools.
The county votech also hires one of our officers per day to deal with their hoodlums.
Our DARE officer is separate from all of those but is only in the schools when they are actively doing something to do with DARE. They have many other duties.
Why? This goes to the stance they have taken as an organization for decades. La Pierre said it himself. The only way to fight a bad man with a gun is with a good man with a man. Everybody should be armed - must be armed - as protection from those who are armed. This maximizes the number of gunowners, which serves to maximize the number of guns. Which is their purpose.
Opposition to this is worse than futile. It’s impossible to know how selective these are, but I’ve seen a number of news reports about stores being cleared out of assault rifles by people worried that some sort of ban might be forthcoming.
Any other approach to such a constituency would be self-defeating in the short run. The long run doesn’t matter, because no one has any idea what that might look like. In truth, the only real change will have to come from society’s attitudes toward guns changing. We’ve seen it happen in a generation over gay marriage, though nearly half the country is still anti. It will take a similar generation for attitudes toward guns to change sufficiently for more than half to turn to anti. La Pierre will be dead by then, and whatever the NRA is like in that future is of no concern to anyone on the Board today.
People concerned by guns have to accept that the NRA will not be part of any solution, and they are delusional if they expect otherwise. You might as well expect PETA to embrace animal sacrifice to control global warming. They are who they are and they have no incentive of any kind to change.
Because every element of the idea is so obviously impractical- particularly the implication that “armed police officers” should be taken off their jobs and stationed in schools because there are a handful of school shootings every year. I’m not surprised their solution to this problem was even more guns because that’s consistent with their views, but in combination with the whining about movies and video games, I think the press conference was primarily an attempt to motivate their supporters and keep them arguing to try and prevent any substantive changes in the law.
What part of “the same training as the FBI” were you confused over? This is the same process that airline pilots go through now. And yes it requires recurrency training. It also involves more than just firing at targets.
uh huh. does this happen a lot at the FBI? Does it happen on airliners?
There is nothing John Wayne about it. Your churlish response aside, there is no rational reason why the same skill-sets of an officer of the law can’t be imparted onto a teacher. What you’re implying is that a college educated person can’t be screened and trained with the exact same skills as an FBI agent. It was the same argument made against airline pilots who carry guns on the plane.
If a well educated person can’t be screened and trained to defend children against a mass murderer (in real time) what reasoning do you have for a less educated person performing the same task? Either you think teachers are stupid or there is some kind of magic in the training course that applying the letters “FBI” grants.
Well considering it’s already being done at a large number of schools I’m surprised you think a nonsense law would make the slightest tiniest difference in the future. There is only one solution to stopping a shooter right now and that is to kill the person.