Doesn’t Chicago have a high crime rate and a high level of gun laws? How does that work?
There are currently 8 or 9 threads on the top of GD dealing with various aspects of gun control with regards to this incident. There are at least 2 in the Pit as well. Let’s not hijack this thread with the broader issues that are already being vigorously discussed elsewhere.
One argument that is trotted out by gun lovers is that other weapons such as knives are just as lethal.
This is egregious and misleading at best, a lie at worst. Lethal means deadly, it does not matter how dead you are killed,if the method is lethal then a gun will make you just as dead as a knife.
Does this mean a knife is more dangerous than a gun? Well there are likely to be many times more knives in the US than guns, and yet its guns that are the main killers, and lets face it - one of the main causes of early death is suicide, guns are the main method of self execution. Which means that guns are far more dangerous to their owners than to others.
In the UK we have had the bombs, we have had the runaway trucks and we have had terrorists running amok with knives. Can you imagine that adding lots of freely available guns would make things safer? Unlikely, and how many mass shootings have we had over the years - last one was Derek Bird and that was in 2010, and since then nothing, whereas in the US we have 18 separate events and we still have a month left in the first quarter.
Are we any better behaved than US citizens? perhaps - but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. It is unimaginable that we would make guns more freely available and yet by the logic of US gun enthusiasts we would be safer :dubious: if more people were armed.
Well if your logic in the US means citizens are safer then the same logic applies here - why is it that US gun idiots such as NRA argue for more weapons in circulation and never try to apply that logic in relatively gunless societies such as UK, Australia, NZ, Japan and all the others - if the argument is good then it is good everywhere YET NONE OF THESE NATIONS ADVOCATE EASIER GUN ACCESS - or maybe the argument is not good - in which case it is not good anywhere.
Look, if you like guns then that’s your affair - but don’t come bleeding to the rest of us with your specious excuses - you have to accept that you are quite prepared to accept that mass shootings will happen and you are willing to put up with them.
You can blame all sorts of others, but you like guns, you have chosen to have them, and you are responsible for the end result, it is a situation of your own making, and you can unmake it any time you wish.
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To clarify the technical point, since others mentioned ‘no body armor’. The likely situation is that the police officer is wearing a vest but the mass shooter has a weapon whose rounds can penetrate it (the officer might or might not be able to realize that definitively at a distance from the sound). The mass shooter might have his own body armor which can defeat rounds from the officer’s handgun (assuming that’s all the officer has). The officer won’t find that out unless and until he shoots it out with the killer.
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But this is very hard for most members of the public (including me) to accept as legitimate. There are ‘jobs’ (as a general term without debating what’s ‘just a job’ and what’s ‘more than just a job’) where you can’t remain in good standing when you refuse to do your duty because you put your and colleagues’ welfare before that of the public. I would say police is one. Fire fighter is another. Certainly not as a standard formula put that definitively. ‘Don’t sacrifice your life in a hopeless attempt to save [a] member[s] of the public’, OK. If a lot of police are really taught, ‘put the public third’ as a broad principal, I think that’s a problem.
Note, while it’s possible some people would respond to this situation by saying ‘well if it was me, I’d go right in’, you don’t have to be bragging about yourself to comment unfavorably on this officer. And likewise it doesn’t work as debating tactic IMO to put down all the negative comments about this officer as claims of superior courage by the commenters. Among the reasons (though not actually one of the main reasons in my own mind) I’m not a police officer is I’m not confident I’d have real guts when the situation demanded it. Police need to have, even if it’s not such a high paid job.
Some comments, here as in the general public conservation, try to put this incident to work in the gun control debate as invalidating the ‘good guy with a gun’ thesis and thus showing the need for more gun control. I think it cuts at least as much the other way. A major pillar of gun control is ‘let the police handle it’. If the principal is really that this officer did what was required (albeit isn’t a hero, but should be too obvious to have to say, I’d think), ie that the police have no obligation to put themselves at serious risk to protect the public, that would seem to argue against more gun control, at least insofar as people who apparently have all their marbles. Ie people who haven’t cause other people close to them to contact the authorities saying they seemed about to go off on a shooting rampage.
But one (lack of) action by one (or a few) cops doesn’t settle any broad question actually. Just as it wouldn’t and shouldn’t end the debate about mass shooting and gun control (or other measures) if this particular officer had somehow been able and willing to stop the shooter before anyone else got hurt.
You can absolutely bet that if this officer had taken this shooter on, even without success and cost to his own life - the gun lobby would use it as justification for their position, they would probably contend that even more guns would have been even better, maybe even the need for more assault rifles.
What it actually does is demonstrate that people are not predictable. Reliance on one hero is not enough, that things happen that can negate this possible protective measure. Multiply it by several hundred thousands of poorly trained teachers and then what?
Of course, if there are no guns, then no armed guards are needed and there are no mass shootings.
Yes you can talk about enforcing the current rules, you can talk about responsible gun ownership and all sorts of things, here is the reality, if you support widespread gun ownership then you also accept the consequences of it, in other words mass shootings of other people are acceptable to you, mass shootings are acceptable to all members of the NRA, and the proof of that is the campaign to ensure that no effective means of gun restriction are enacted.
Go and blame the school security officer, but then take a good look at yourself - have you accepted that mass shootings occur because you like guns? If not, why not? if you have then please explain why your pleasure is more important than the lives of children in school.
The security cop is human, behaves in human ways and will have to live with it, can you live with your love of guns and the results? If so then that is fair enough - it is your choice.
My point exactly. The violent tendencies of humans can never fully be eradicated, waiting for it to happen before doing anything about the availability of guns is a juvenile course of action.
how do you sneak one of them into a classroom? Are they easier to acquire and operate than a gun? Is this why special forces typically use 3 series BMW’s as assault weapons instead of rifles?
and where can I buy one of those off the shelf?
Same arguments, different thread.
But you are comparing a proposed realistic if limited tool (arming teachers or having police/more police assigned to schools) to something which is entirely unrealistic in the US situation starting from now: ‘if there were no guns’. There’s limited value in that kind of comparison IMO.
‘Tool’ because there is no ‘solution’ to the mass (or even just school) shooting problem. Limiting new sales of certain types of guns* would also IMO qualify, barely as a realistic tool (very unlikely IMO to be enacted nationally any time soon, but not as unrealistic as ‘if there were no guns’ starting from a few 100 million in the US). Not to sidetrack one more thread on either of those tools. Maybe we should have one, both or neither. My point is just that it’s useless to compare limited possible tools like either of those to stuff like ‘if there were no guns’.
And gun control in general (even well short of ‘no guns’) involves lots of issues besides mass shootings. However as I noted above, in other contexts of the gun control issue the pro-more gun control side often invokes the protection provided by the police as a reason there should be fewer guns: ‘count on the police, they are the professionals’. Here it seems some of pro-gun control opinion are now lumping the police in as just another form of unreliable ‘good guys with guns’. That has implications not always favorable to more gun control in other contexts besides this particular one.
*such as box magazine fed center-fire semi-automatic rifles aka ‘assault weapons’, grandfathering in existing ones, as all the states with ‘bans’ have done, and the former national ‘ban’ on ‘assault weapons’ did also.
Just out of curiosity, why is the call to the FBI damning, but not all the other contacts with local law enforcement?
If the military says they write a blank check payable by their life, then the cops should fall under the same umbrella. This guy should have gone in.
There may have been 17 killed, but there are 18 victims. Scot Peterson may be alive, but his career and life are over. Especially since everybody is judging him in hindsight, with information that wasn’t available at the time of the incident.
At the time of the incident, it was unknown how many shooters there were, or what type and how many weapons were in use. What if there had been several shooters? Do you still think he should have “gone in”? Maybe he was told via the radio to stand down and wait for backup. Officials need someone to throw under the bus, and they have found him.
Meanwhile, the shooter is resting comfortably, even taking less flak that Scot Peterson, while receiving free food, legal counsel, and the best medical care available. And he’ll probably outlive most of us.
More information is coming out.
I can understand one guy not going in.
This is not excusable. The original four deputies let other officers go in and they didn’t back them up? I see why an investigation is needed.
I’m willing to reserve judgement on the officer who waited four minutes and then resigned, but it does appear to me that the Broward Sheriff’s Department has response, leadership, and training problems.
Drive straight through the wall. But before you do that you can mow down the kids on their way to school. And unlike guns, there is no magazine limit to a full tank of gas. it’ a weapon with 200 miles worth of people to run over. And unlike a gun it provides it’s own escape mechanism.
You’ve been watching the A-team haven’t you? You really think it is easier to drive through a brick wall and kill 17 people than using a gun?
But again, is that in some way easier than using a gun?
Can you comment in this thread:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=849927
If the deputy wasn’t going to engage the shooter, what the hell was he doing there in the first place?
Every moment he didn’t go in was more time for the killer to kill more victims. If Peterson went in, maybe Peterson would have been killed, but at least there was a *chance *he could nail the gunman and the shooting spree could be abruptly brought to an end. By not going in, it was *guaranteed *that the spree wasn’t going to stop anytime soon.
Great idea, let’s spend the life of one person on a chance, one where you have not got the information and one in which you are making judgements when you have no idea of what that person knew at the time - honestly, these post event armchair warriors really should shut up - especially when they are merely echoing the politically motivated comments by Trump and the NRA.
I don’t know the details, neither do you, I do not rush to judgement -it’d be nice if you did the same.
There will be an investigation - we want that investigation to take place in a suitable manner and not influenced by various interested groups with and axe to grind - so, let’s await the report in silence.
This off duty police officer went in. He was outside, so he did hear the shots.
We depend on the police to protect us. What are we supposed to do when they can’t/won’t?
The officer did fail in his job and should have been fired if he hadn’t resigned. But I do feel sorry for him, and I would like to know more about what his training was. It is an unnatural action to run towards gunfire, and from what I understand that’s why military and cops have active shooter training to get over the part of your lizard brain that makes you freeze or want to run away. There’s a difference from being instructed on that’s what you need to do, and running drills on it to make sure that you actually can do it in a practice simulation. Had he been properly trained on this? Was it recent, or was the last time 5 years ago?
This tweet thread is relevant, from someone in a similar situation who knew what he should do, had a gun, but froze.
Also a lot of people are saying about how the resource officer should have stopped the shooter, but have any school resource officers ever stopped school shootings? From this tweet thread, there have been 25 school shootings since Columbine, and they all ended in suicide, an unarmed school employee disarmed the shooter, or actual police (not school police) stopped the shooter. None were stopped by a school officer. This officer failed at his job, but it sounds like he’s not the first one, so maybe the solution isn’t better school resource officers, but preventing angry kids from getting guns.