Wisconsin was declared to be one of the top few states representing the demographics of this country. We tend to fall about 50% on each side when issues are voted on, and projects are implimented. In other words nothing is acomplished. We do have some damn nutty politicians, but this won’t pass. I say use gas that knocks out everyone in a few seconds, like the anti-terrorists teams in the mid-east and Europe. a couple dead students from the gas effects will still save more students than if there’s a shoot out. The residents of the town can take turns kicking the person after they wake up.
But gas is not very effective outdoors. and potentially very expensive to retrofit into a building.
All kids are brainwashed in kindergarten with a trigger word that makes them fall into a hypnotic trance at any moment.
This way teachers can ‘disarm and subdue’ students very quickly.
The word is a non-sense word that is really just a bunch of letters randomly typed.
Algebra
Heh, and I was expecting something in Russian about birds. 
I think every classroom should have one of these installed just over the blackboard, and the teacher has the remote trigger. Then if the little buggers start to misbehave, you can turn the entire classroom into hamburger.
This has all kinds of motivational uses as well.
fraid so. we even pass special taxes and get grants to fund em.
Sigh.
Course if any of them actually stop a school shooting, then that person will have been worth the cost, but the other 99.99% of the “school safety officers” will simply provide a little more pressure on the kids. They are good people, don’t get me wrong, but that is still half the power of god on their belt, and it is bound to have an effect on the kids.
Like I said, I am in the minority on this subject.
That worked so well the last time it was tried 
That was the exact incident that I was thinking of when I posted. I hope you understand that a few deaths from reactions to the gas is acceptable, and turns kicking the person is sarcastic humor. Providing help for people in trouble is my serious answer. We had two local teens put away last year for attempted murder in seperate incidents. The common item in the incidents, was that parents tried to get help for the kids way before the attempted murders. Wisconsin had no services to help when needed, and things got worse until the teens attempted murder. Instead of a few thousand in help we now spend at least $10,000 yearly jailing them. I knew the parents plight wasn’t exaggerated when they testified, because I had experienced the same absolute no help of any kind is available for even the most desperate situation from the state. Two teens about to start their adult life will now likely never be the positive contributing adults they could have been had some help been there when first needed. This goes for adults in mid life too. People react out like these gunmen, because they know nobody gives a shit, and the only helping hand they’ll see, is a hand pushing them down.
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Jesus! What sort of jail did you guys put them in? Are you using “jail” interchangably with prison? Jail is more expensive than prison, yes, but it doesn’t cost $10,000 a year for an individual inmate. The statistics you see on that are very misleading.
Take the prison in which my husband works. It has an annual budget of over $30 million. It houses over 2,900 felons. Now, you could divide the number of inmates by the overall cost and get a huge figure, but that isn’t really an accurate reflection of the costs.
The expenses involved with keeping the prison open are fixed. Utilities, maintenance and staff are what makes up the lion’s share of that amount. If an additional 500 inmates are added, they don’t get a bump in their funding, nor do they hire additional staff. (In fact, inmate populations are rising while at the same time, staff is being cut back.) Excepting medical costs (which are admittedly huge) it only costs the state about 20 cents a day to feed an inmate.
It’s a figure that the state figured out per prisoner a couple years ago. The local jail submitted a budget last year figuring payments from other jurisdictions at $8,500 per prisoner per year as income to run it. I’m not going to get into disagreements in how acounting is done. The main point is that no money was spent to stabilize these people before they reached the point of attepted murder. Many peoples lives are now forever negatively affect by this.
The problem is that our criminal justice system is reactive, not proactive. The state cannot punish people for violent fantasies, nor can you force any sort of treatment on someone who doesn’t want it unless you can prove that they’re a danger to themselves or others. If the parents are in denial, their chances for getting help for their kids before they get to the dangerous stage are slim indeed. Talking about killing people might get you suspended or ordered to go through counselling as a condition for returning to school, but it’s not enough to compel a civil commitment. It’s only once they put the plan in action that anything can be “done.”
What do you want them to do? Mandate psychological testing for every kid who seems dissafected? The funds aren’t there. And what makes you think a dissafected kid would be willing to pour out his soul, anyway?
Shortly after they were released, I read all 900 pages of the Columbine Papers. I learned a lot from them. Frankly, I don’t think there’s much the school or the justice system could have done to prevent it. The boys were careful to appear normal, getting their assignments done on time and staying out of trouble. A trained psychologist may have been able to read the signs, but teachers aren’t trained psychologists. Their parents might have been able to stop them if they’d read the boys’s diaries or paid attention to their activities, but they didn’t. And there’s no way to mandate parental attention.
The only way to stop things like this from happening is to fundamentally change human nature. Kids are cruel and they’re also painfully short-sighted. As long as there are kids who torment those who are different, there are going to be kids who want to get revenge and make others feel the pain they’ve been feeling.
In both cases the teens and parents wanted them to get counseling and were told no help was available unless they had the money to see a privite shrink. They barely were scraping by, and couldn’t get the help. In the case of one, a volunteer mental health clinic, told the parents to go away, your kid is way beyond help here. They only deal with slight mental illness. Murder is definately one of the outcomes for not having public treatment available. You won’t get everybody, but you will get some. My opinion is that people shouldn’t be left destitute in this country. The people that can let everyone stay destitute and ill, don’t even see that it costs them in having more crime and violence to deal with. In desperation and despair people will lash out in a unpredictable manor, that they don’t even expect they can. I feel it criminal to leave people destitute and ill reguardless of any advantage to myself for personal safty or financial enrichment. People need at minimum hope, humane treatment, and health. When one of those go, they need outside support. I have felt this way since a child and will untill I die. The people that try to scam others, gets brought up all the time to distract people from a fundimental need in this country. Scamming should be addressed as the criminal act it is, and seperate from discussions on basic humane conditions and treatment of people.
I agree with you that psychiatric care should be readily available to anyone who wants it. That said, it still wouldn’t help the families who are in denial about the problem.
When I was in school, there was a boy who was, in my non-psycologically trained opinion, batshit crazy. The poor kid had absolutely no control over his violent rages. The kid’s parents insisted that he was just a little “hyperactive” and he’d grow out of it, and the principal of my school thought she could paddle it out of him. Probaby the only reason he never killed anyone at school was because he didn’t have a chance-- he as expelled from every school in which he was enrolled and finally just stopped going. He’s in prison now, or so I’ve heard.
Not to harp on the Columbine thing, but I had never heard the parents tried to seek psychiatric help and were rebuffed. One of the dads (Klebold, I believe) had a notebook in which he recorded the disciplinary efforts they made. I saw no mention of a shrink in there. Secondly, though hindsight is 20/20, it doesn’t seem like they made all that much of an effort to keep tabs on what their kids were doing. I know-- most parents feel it’s a gross violation of privacy to read their kids’ diaries, but if your kid is so disturbed that you claim to have sought psychiatric help, why wouldn’t you read it?
How does a kid assemble an arsenal without their parents knowing? I know as a kid if I’d been spending hours in the garage or basement, my parents would have come around offering assistance with my project (or, more accuarately, snooping.) If I’d acted in a secretive manner, it would have set off alarm bells, making them want to redouble their efforts to find out what was going on. And I wasn’t even someone who was disturbed or dissafected.
Arming teachers is clearly not the right idea here. What we need are Federal School Marshals. Undercover operatives who sit in on classes like any other student until terror strikes! Paging officer Thomas Hanson….
I hope your not taking my statements to mean it will stop school violence. It’s one thing that needs to be done to lessen the dangers in the community at large. We have had two failed school attacks in Wisconsin this fall because in each case a student reported it, before the murders occured.
I’ve just read an article on the 1920’s bombing and murders in Bath Michigan. A man didn’t like the tax burden the new school building imposed and he got onto the school board and then started doing building maintenance. He wired the whole school to blow up with a huge amount of dynamite. The school had over 300 students enrolled. He killed his wife and blew up a school wing. He was killed in the blast outside the building. Over 35 people mostly childern 6 to 8 years old died and the loss was minimized by accidental circumstance. School tests were going on and the older students didn’t come in until later for the tests. A device in the bomb failed so only one wing was demolished instead of the whole building. I wrote this from memory, so I believe it’s all accurate.
I more or less agree here. Although I don’t want every teacher to carry a gun, I can see it as OK that a couple of heavily vetted, trained and fully authorized teachers might carry a concealed handgun.
I’d suggest one of the new semi-autos that works only for the owner with a “key”.
Quite accurate, although I’d add that the attacker used a car bomb (a historic first) to kill both himself & several public officials in the blast.
Teachers carrying sidearms is akin to Police serving in a dual role as Paramedics. Conceptually, it may be good in a few situations, but when it turns bad, it’s VERY bad.
Besides that, simply having a gun doesn’t give you the will or the courage it takes to blast a hole in some troubled kid who you’ve been trying to help for half a dozen years. It’s a bad situation, to be certain, but as someone already addressed here, we’re not really getting to the root causes of the school violence problem.
The absolute, number one root cause, IME is a lack of parental involvement. Parents are too busy with their “lives” to make sure their kids aren’t screwing up. I work with kids in a program here, and the lack of parental involvement compared to what it was when I grew up is staggering. It’s easy to blame the lack on all the things one purportedly “needs” to “survive” which forces the parents to work all sorts of hours, but ultimately, it boils down to people (read: parents) who are vein, shallow, materialistic, overtly permissive, and in some cases, too bloody chickenshit to lay down the law to their little darlings, while they ignore the prada knockoff purse or the latest computer.
As a kid, you have no privacy (of course, as you mature, the scale should slide, except when it shouldn’t). As a kid, your rights are the ones given to you by the law and your parents. Period. And in some cases, the law oversteps it’s boundaries.
It’s all very enlightened to be a hands-off parent, trying to “reason” with your child, and be his or her friend, but it’s not effective. Kids need to have the same amount of respect and fear when it comes to their parents, and that’s impossible when the parents aren’t about. Kids have enough friends, they need guidance, guardians, and the occasional foot in the ass.
They’d have to carry the gun in a holster like a gunslinger of the American West to have it make any difference. You’ld have an accessable weapon at hand the moment the teacher is distracted, be it coming out of the desk drawer or the hip holster.