Oooohh, you may be on to something. Give everyone in the school, but students, staff, & visitors a taser-level electric shock collar. If/when they pull out a gun ::Zzzzzzttt!:: they fall down quivering for a few minutes until their muscles regain control, by which time the PD is there & have them in disarmed & in cuffs.
Pros: [ul]
[li]It will also end barking.[/li][/ul] Cons: [ul]
[li]Cost[/li][li]Someone has to active the correct shock collar - or do we just want to Zap everyone by depressing the button[/li][li]How many of the school shooters checked in at the office before beginning their rampage?[/li][/ul]
OK, hear me out. We rig up super-dooper strong electromagnets in every doorway. When the big red Emergency button is pushed, it turns on the magnets. Anyone attempting to walk through a door, or even near one, will have their guns ripped from their hands and rendered inoperable. It has the added bonus of taking care of other weapons, like knives, nunchucks, and throwing stars. Brass knuckles might still be a problem, although I’ve not kept current with knuckle technology so maybe they aren’t still made of actual brass.
I also like the idea of magnetic floors as shown in the documentary Face Off. This would require all students and visitors to wear the special boots, but anyone who thinks that is impractical clearly doesn’t like kids and isn’t interested in solutions.
There are some good ideas here but they all require equipping students with shock collars or rebuilding schoolrooms, which is obviously impractical in the near term and that there might be various budgetary issues and/or legal challenges which could hold it up for years. We clearly need to ACT NOW, so the ideal solution is to obtain a supply of gaseous incapacitation agent and provide supplies to every school to pump into classrooms and hallways when needed. Russia has some experience with this so perhaps we can get some advice from Putin on the proper application. It could also be used to deal with those pesky demonstrators and striking teachers, so it is multi-purpose!
I like to think that when my posts don’t get razzed, it’s because they’re sensible and not just because I spent most of my adult life teaching teens. All teachers, your wife included, are horrified by the idea of shooters in their classrooms. Our desperate hope can make us imagine scenarios that are more idealistic than realistic. Your paintball/spray paint idea came from just such a sincere and laudable sentiment, and so did your wife’s endorsement of it. My own belief is that in real-life scenarios, some of these ideas just won’t work. I had a colleague who planned to have her students throw textbooks. I tried to explain to her that textbooks aren’t exactly aerodynamic and don’t make good missiles. I think the school cop finally talked her out of it, but in her mind, those textbooks would be launched with deadly accuracy by brave kids.
I agree with you, which is why something designed to be aimed in a specific area strikes me as a better idea.
Aha, someone finally admits outright what I suspected: many of you don’t want practical mitigation schemes, because not having any keeps maximum pressure on the NRA. Sorry: in this case I’m not interested in fighting a culture war—I just want realistic, bite-sized ideas to protect my kids. Even if it leaves them 91% likely to die in a shooting instead of 92%.
Have you tried home-schooling your kids? That will keep them safe. Unless you have guns in the house, at which point they are probably safer at school.
You don’t. SlackerInc is going to shoot you in the eye with a paintball gun.
No other nation in the developed world has the problem of domestic school and public mass shootings to anywhere near even the order of magnitude of frequency we have, and that is even before discounting radicalized terrorist attacks versus angry teenager shooters who have somehow managed to gain access to multiple firearms and ammunition. Maybe, just perhaps, we should look at why that is so and whether their approaches to reducing domestic violence could work for us before grasping at ridiculous and facile ‘solutions’ which provide negligible reduction in the hazard or attacking the credibility of students who protest against inaction by suggesting that they should learn CPR.
The NRA has long and well earned the current broad vilification for their staunch refusal and active opposition to measures which control the access to firearms by children and emotionally unstable people, as well as their promotion of more firearms as a solution to mass shootings. They are actually the worst advocate responsible gun owners have because their extemist, non-reality-based positions make all gun owners look terrible, and their refusal to advocate for rational oversight and holding owners and sellers responsible for not taking reasonable measures to assure that their weapons are kept out of the hands of criminals and malcontents will inevitably lead to a curtailing of rights and permissivity toward firearms ownership across the board, responsible or not.
As I have said repeatedly, I don’t have any guns; and yes, I did try homeschooling for a couple years. No more of that for me, thanks!
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Stranger, I agree that the NRA sucks. Though it isn’t really a top down problem: it sucks because of all the ridiculous people in it. But no amount if complaining from urbane city slickers will make those ridiculous people go away, or change the fact that Wyoming and Idaho combine for twice as many senators as California.
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I hate to inform you, that while well intentioned, your idea won’t work for a couple of reasons, including:
[ul]
[li]Any kid wearing an old-school punk rock jacket will be immediately asphyxiated when the magnets pull all that metal to it.[/li][li]The cost of settling emotional distress lawsuits for outing those with body piercings in sensitive areas who end up hanging upside down by the hoo-hahs when the magnets kick in.[/li][/ul]
So help me out here. Are you saying that your proposals are so obviously practical that the only reason anyone could say they’re impractical is not because they ARE impractical but because those people want kids to remain unsafe to keep up pressure on the NRA? If so, I’m definitely not following. Remember my colleague who thought books would make nifty missiles? She was wrong, but she never thought I was trying to interfere with a (in her mind) practical solution because I was trying to pressure the NRA. My hope is she realized the error in her reasoning and came up with a better solution.
I get it. It’s painful to have ideas dismissed out of hand. Don’t let it defeat you or make you dig in your heels. Go high and go back to the drawing board.
