Y’know, both of my parents are school principals. I worry every. Single. Day that some stupid fucking dumbass is going to walk in and put a bullet in one of their heads. I haven’t got an ounce of sympathy for anyone that walks in to a school with a gun. Lock 'em up solitary or execute them if they use it. I really don’t give a fuck, because no one gets paid enough to get shot at.
Yeah, what a great fucking idea…All the teachers I had when I grew up were just prime candidates to carry a weapon all day. Sane, logical and upstanding citizens to the one and fully capable of discerning any situation and warranting whether or not deadly force is/was necessary. And of course, there is just sooooo much funding available to schools for continual gun training and provding mental assesments.
Ummm…HELLO!!! Wake up folks! There is a huge difference between arming Pilots (folk who go through a medical examination every 6 months, ongoing training and analysis, peer reviews, psyche analysis, etc) and underpaid teachers.
Pull your heads out. Arming teachers would cause more deaths, not prevent them.
-Tcat
Are you sure Crafter_Man wasn’t being sarcastic?
No, but it seems unlikely:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7528333&postcount=3
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7756694&postcount=102
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7648663&postcount=28
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7812861&postcount=32
The common theme is “more guns is good”.
Wow. I mean WOW. :eek:
And I continue to thank my lucky stars that I was born in a country that does not consider gun-ownership to be the norm.
Fuck. :eek:
I stand corrected, then.
I have to wonder what the death toll would’ve been in Edinboro, PA had it not been for James Strand who pointed a shotgun at the shooter and stopped him as he was reloading, 11 minutes before the police arrived.
How many would’ve been killed in Pearl, MS if Assistant Principal Joel Myrick hadn’t retrieved his .45 caliber pisstol from his car, loaded it, and immobilized the shooter?
Mr. Myrick prevented the shooter from driving away armed with a .30-30.
At Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA, a student opened fire at the school and killed three people before two other students, Michael Gross and Tracy Bridges, managed to retreive personal firearms from their cars and subdue him.
Three shootings, six deaths.
And then there’s Columbine. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve students and a teacher before committing suicide. The SWAT team didn’t even approach Harris and Klebold until they were already dead.
Fifteen people, including the attackers, dead.
Of course the media has virtually ignored Joel Myrick, James Strand, Michael Gross and Tracy Bridges, but we’ve all heard of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
You know, maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did. Maybe it’d make things worse. It certainly wouldn’t have helped in this occasion.
And clearly arming every teacher isn’t a good idea. Maybe we just need a cop on duty at every school. (Yeah, that’d work well.)
But it’s the only thing I can think of that would deal with problems like this, where the threat is external.
Not in the cities, but in Rural Australia I think you’ll find gun ownership is indeed the norm.
Victoria has one of the highest rates of firearm ownership in the country, followed by Queensland…
BS. It works in Israel. Works in the Phillippines. Works in Peru.
But I guess American teachers can’t be trusted… :rolleyes:
Indeed. Guns save lives.
catsix: Good point, but all those people took the responsibility on themselves. They chose to act, and before that, they chose to become gun owners. And in two of your examples, the gun was in a car, not in the classroom where someone else could have appropriated it at a wrong time. Also, it sounds like, when they took action, they were not already facing down the gun, at which point it would have been too late.
CNN are reporting that another girl has died of her injuries 
Can’t imagine what would provoke someone to take revenge 20 yrs after an event - he would have be 10 or 11 at the time, but to store it up that long suggests it was something harsh.
As long as we are engaging in hypotheticals, one wonders if anyone would’ve been killed if tougher gun laws had been in place keeping the shooters from getting guns at all. I’m not advocating tougher gun laws, but I felt that needed to be said.
In these recent cases, I think that having armed teachers would’ve made little difference. The shooters offed themselves. Obviously they weren’t worried about getting out alive. The armed teacher wouldn’t have deterred them, and the possible gunfight might have resulted in more deaths/injuries.
If I had been the teacher in that schoolhouse, I guarantee those girls would still be alive.
You keep saying that as if it’s that easy for everyone. A person has to be a willing gun owner and carrier in order to be a proficient, responsible, courageous gun user. Forcing that reponsibility on every teacher is a very. bad. idea.
As a teacher, this is particularly upsetting.
But to answer your last point, England has far less school shootings than the US, presumably due to our gun ban.
If the intruder hadn’t had a gun, those girls would still be alive.
Instead of sweeping statements, why not consider the evidence as to what does prevent school shootings?
Guns don´t kill people, is the culture that says “guns solve problems” that kills people.
Simple fix: make it a prerequisite for every teacher to undergo firearms training and carry a gun. If a teacher is not willing to undergo training and carry a firearm, they’re not issued a teaching certificate.