At last, we get to the real point. A teacher out in the halls with a gun just adds someone else in the way of the sharpshooters. A teacher locked in his/her room with the students on the floor might just save some of them.
There is just too much danger in guns in the classroom. We are not trained police officers, nor should we be. At the moment there isn’t the money in most school systems to provide in-services (in school training for content, or curriculum purposes) I can’t see them being able to come up with the money for police accadamy training too. If their were more money, there are alot of classes on conflict resolution and management techniques to avoid power struggles, that would help many of us. Those won’t help with the kid that is out to murder the school, but we have just thrown that out as a time when guns would be useful. Avoiding problems that need guns seems like a much better use of money than trying to arm the schools.
I am neither for guns, nor am I against them. They are a tool. Maybe everything can be a hammer but a hammer isn’t always the right tool for the job.
This, again, is anti-gun rights dogma that just isn’t borne out in the real world. Claims similar to this have been made by the reactive, asshole, anti-gun rights drones for many years now. And there has yet to be a single instance that I’m aware of where a properly licensed CCW holder has escalated a violent incident into what your dogma portrays as inevitable. This, some form of concealed carry law on the books in 46 of the 50 states and millions of CCW licenses issued. (I’ll leave for another day the issue of whether I think state issued licenses for concealed carry should even be required.)
Oddly enough, the folks who want to obtain CCW licenses are law-abiding folk and care greatly about gun safety and the proper use of such in a violent incident. I would confidently speculate that school faculty and staff who would choose to arm themselves would show even greater responsibility than the average prospective CCW licensee. I say confidently, because I’m very certain the requirements for a school faculty or staff member wishing to take part in such a program would be required to take far more instruction, in both classroom and practical use, than would be the average CCW licensee; the requirements and legal obligations that would be placed on these folk would be stringent in the extreme. To assume otherwise is not logical.
The simple fact is, during the 10 hours of classroom instruction (in addition, two hours of range time was required which culminated in a safe-handling & proficiency test) I was required to take before I could be issued my CCW license, the situation you describe—and various others—was covered in great detail several times—and was vitally stressed on the written exam. Holders of a CCW license are instructed how to act, and what to do/not do, if they ever decide to use deadly force. These instructions cover all phases of the use of deadly force: the moments leading up to the use, the actual use & the aftermath.
Of equal importance, are the guidelines laid down in the study course, that a prospective CCW holder is required by law to follow (and he must be able to demonstrate to the cops that he did indeed follow these guidelines in making his decision) before he even brandishes his weapon. A licensed CCW holder quite simply knows the Rules of Engagement. That they do, and that they are responsible gun owners, is shown by the vanishingly small number of incidents of any type of violent criminal behavior by license holders over the past 20 years.
And ya know what else? The NRA helped many states write these guidelines and Rules of Engagement. Astonishing isn’t it, that an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of gun owners actually knows something about guns, their use, and the safe handling of same?
UncleBeer, I was not referring to guns in general. I was referring to the idea of guns in a school. As has been hashed out in this thread, guns in school is a problematic solution. Too many ways for it to go wrong to be practical, and that is with proper training of teachers. Just letting the teachers bring in whatever they have around the house without some sort of regulation, control, or proper training in handling a school shooting scenario would be nightmarish at best.
Once again, I have no problem with people having concealed weapons, just letting people pack them in schools.
Well, you’ve supposed quite a number of things there that are yet to be proven. I believe this is a logical fallacy called “begging the question.”
Most importantly, you say there are “[t]oo many ways for it to go wrong to be practical, and that is with proper training of teachers.” You’re right; this has been said—many times over in this thread. It has not, however, been proven an impractical solution. Repetion is not evidence of truth. Sure it’s problematic; this does not me its not solvable.
You also said, “Just letting the teachers bring in whatever they have around the house without some sort of regulation, control, or proper training in handling a school shooting scenario would be nightmarish at best.” And I couldn’t agree more. But then not a single person, not even the oft-maligned NRA, has proposed this. There is yet a single person, or entity, that has advocated the introduction of firearms into the classroom without restriction. The NRA, in the person of Sandra Froman, has only said that maybe it’s time to study this option.
I did not get the impression from the article that they were advocating arming teachers in the classroom. Instead, it seemed to me like they were advocating something along the lines of a secure storage facility in the office where weapons could be distributed as needed.
And that would be far, far better than unarmed people trying to stop an armed intruder.
Which is why we are discussing it here. My statement by the way was in response to crafterman’s post which looked to me as if he were advocating just letting people bring the guns into schools.
And while we do not know if any of the things I have posted could happen, a school is not an appropriate place to go testing it.
The way I look at it, there are two ways in which the guns in school would work for the better.
One is as a deterrent, which given the rarity of school shootings, would be nearly impossible to prove. Think of Lisa Simpsons tiger repellant rock.
The other would be as a way of stopping the shooter before he kills anyone (unlikely unless the teachers are already packing and are waiting at the door) or a way of minimizing the number of students injured and killed (there are better or at least more practical ways of doing that).
If you would like to respond to the points that I raised with FinnAgain, feel free. But just saying that things will work out fine is just as silly as saying everything will go wrong.