What if all students (at least those beyond a certain age) kept paintball guns under their chairs, and were taught to aim them at an assailant’s face? And then when he (always a he) is blinded and disoriented, rush him and take away his guns.
For younger grades or as an alternative, could something be made that a teacher could have in his/her desk that would shoot a LOT of paint with one shot?
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You do realize that the class nerd would come home with a multi-colored back pretty much every day, right? :smack:
School bullying is bad enough, this would only make it worse…far worse.
Remote-controlled weaponized robots.
The number of kids who’d get eye injuries if there were that many paintball guns floating around American schools would be huge. Not to mention the cost of keeping the guns firing ready, and for what? Mitigating the consequences of a narrow portion of school shooting scenarios.
What do you do if you want herostratic fame for killing the most kids in a school and you know they have paintball guns? Pull the fire alarm and gun them down as they exit the classroom.
That’s a fair point, but after the first few are shot they could run back in to get the paintball guns—instead of cowering in closets to be picked off at the gunman’s leisure.
And I’m glad you brought up fire alarms. Everybody is already reacting like kids would just fire off these guns for the fuck of it. But (I didn’t think I had to spell this out) they would get in huge fucking trouble for doing that! It’s a lot easier to pull a fire alarm without people seeing who did it, but that’s rare. I remember it happened once in all my school years, when I went to a particularly rowdy junior high. And the administration went apeshit about it.
Kids could also grab fire extinguishers and goof around with them, but do they? I’ve never heard of it.
These would be understood as “break glass (not literally) in emergencies only”. I suppose with the high tech available today, you could have a loud alarm go off as soon as someone takes one of the paintball guns out of its case.
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Yes, because it, morally, should be the children’s responsibility to shoot a gunman aiming at killing them.
And I didn’t think I’d have to spell this out: Schools don’t handle discipline very well. They either apply it inconsistently and with a huge degree of favoritism, as per the teacher’s pet and jocks-versus-nerds paradigms, or they retreat into Zero Tolerance, where they cannot be accused of poor judgement because they exercise no judgment whatsoever, punishing the bully and victim absolutely the same.
Indeed they don’t. Maybe that’s what’s wrong: We don’t train children to be combat-ready, and competent to use what’s around them in a life-or-death situation. Surely if they were properly trained, why, no school shooter would stand a chance, much like how Our Brave Boys are never troubled by insurgents in places like Iraq or Afghanistan!
They’d have to have very good aim to hit the shooter’s face. And what if the shooter comes prepared with goggles? With peel away covers?
Morally? WTF, this sounds like the objections you hear when someone gives teenage girls advice like not accepting unsealed drinks, having a buddy system, etc. “We shouldn’t have to do that!” Well, okay…I guess you could also say I shouldn’t have to lock my front door at night, or I ought to be able to leave a wad of cash visible in my unlocked car, because morally, stealing it is still wrong.
Then there’s those of us who live in reality and want to mitigate harm.
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Thirty kids don’t have to individually have good aim. Peel off goggles? Might be hard to coordinate with gunning and reloading, and give someone a chance to charge them (we also need to teach kids to charge en masse: even if that might accelerate the moment of death for one or two, it’s far preferable to cowering and getting picked off one by one).
Or maybe it would be the perfect shooter and none of it would work, in which case you are exactly where you’d be without the paintball guns. But that’s raising the difficulty level for the shooter quite a bit—isn’t that a good start?
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While the shooter just has to hit any part of any kid to cause injury. I think the odds are in the shooter’s favor.
Goggles will allow the shooter to be alert and focused even if covered by paint. As for reloading, in this scenario, are 100-round magazines still available for the shooter to buy?
Minus the cost of the paintball guns and time for training. The question is “is it better than nothing” but “is it the best use of time and resources.”
The ones who hold to that view are proposing normal, workable solutions, not insane plans to turn schools into paramilitary training grounds.
Just because some people whine and scream about how they’d rather commit suicide-by-cop than go along with gun control doesn’t make gun control impossible or even a bad idea. It just means some people would rather kill themselves than admit they were wrong, and that is nothing new, and certainly nothing that should influence policy.
See, you could just mount a couple of guns or lasers on these badboys and keep them at every school in a closet with the vacuum cleaners. There’d be a national center which would be manned by operators 24/7 who would remotely control the robots, like pilots of unmanned aerial vehicle drones, as soon as someone at the school had hit an emergency button.
Why not just give the kids guns? Don’t they have a Second Amendment right to defend themselves?
Umm…this is a terrible idea. It’s far more likely the paintball guns would be misused for mischief, than that they would see use in a school shooting.
School shootings, as awful as they are, are still like plane crashes: The odds of a student experiencing a school shooting are very, very low. This is like people who suggested ejection seats for airline passengers: Far more likely to cause trouble than good.
I don’t own a gun. Neither does my mom, or my in-laws. The only person in my extended family who does is one MAGA cousin who has an arsenal.
Nevertheless, I’m well aware that the idea of getting rid of the 500 million guns in America is ludicrous. Sure, ban the bump stocks and high capacity cartridges. But you’re not going to get rid of all the guns that would allow school shooters to kill plenty of kids if we don’t take countermeasures.
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Also, it’s ludicrous to suggest that the likelihood of mass insurrection if we started “grabbing guns” (as my cousin always is paranoid is about to happen) should not influence our policy. Should it not matter when we’re deciding, say, where to put a U.S. embassy if experts believe it would be constantly overrun with guerilla fighters?
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I note that various ideas have been suggested here to stop regular US school shootings:
etc.
If these were implemented, it would seem pretty scary to me to be a pupil in the US.
The proven alternative is gun control.
There’s a million things that would be as useful as a paint gun to distract a gunman in order to incapacitate him or more. Chairs. A can of soda. Chalk dust. Cellphones. I guess paint guns would give them better range than a thrown chair, but in tight school halls not that much.
The problem is, of course, that it’s hard to be all that tactical when facing actual bullets.
Paintball guns are terribly inaccurate and disabling someone requires actually hitting them in the eyes. And you want kids who’ve managed to run away to go back into the line of fire …
Pulling a fire alarm isn’t particularly entertaining though.
And unlike a paintball gun a fire extinguisher isn’t designed to be a “fun toy”.
So now we’ve moved from “a paintball gun under every chair” to “paintball guns in alarmed cases”. That would probably work, but you’ve upped the cost by an order of magnitude.
Why not support they guy who wants a bucket of rocks in every classroom instead? That makes more sense and is cheaper by far.
That was part of my inspiration, but:
(1) If he’s wearing a helmet and shatterproof goggles, they won’t do much, whereas paint would blind him;
(2) I don’t get how the whole class shares one bucket of rocks.
But what about something that sprays the paint instead of shooting it?
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