It is damned ugly to have armed guards in schools, but perhaps it would save some kids lives.
Remember the hiring fiasco that became the TSA? Now imagine that clusterfuck…only with guns for everyone. Imagine future slaughtermeisters finding out that not only will they be able to bring a gun into schools, but that the government is going to pay them to do it. How do you plan on screening out the nutcases, and how much more in time and money will such screening take?
No, I don’t have a clue.
Was he speaking about off duty policemen, or random NRA members?
If he was talking about off-duty policemen, he’s an idiot of the highest magnitude. There wouldn’t be enough policemen in an average town to cover the schools, even if they all were forced to take on this second job.
Retired policemen? Military veterans? Some of them are scary. Certainly not random NRA members.
Case in point: for the presidential election, our township clerk asked for a police officer to be stationed at every polling place. The local police did not have the manpower to cover every building for the entire day; there was one building that had a full-day officer and the others had an officer at random times, and at the close of polls. That was for a single day. And this is a fairly affluent suburb; one you might think had the cash to pay out for the security, but they simply didn’t have enough cops. A full time, trained security officer in every school building, all day, every day? They’d have to double the size of the police force.
Oh, and as a side note - the reason the clerk asked for the police protection? The last few elections in a row, some voter in one of the precincts made a big hairy deal about Carrying His Gun when he came in to vote. Not just wearing it, but making sure people knew he was Exercising His Second Amendment Rights. He made other voters nervous enough to complain, so the clerk asked for a full-time cop at his precinct specifically. And yeah, we heard later he apparently came in as expected, Wearing His Gun. The cop was taking a break at the moment. Nothing happened, as expected, the guy’s just a big blowhard; but if for some reason it had, the planned security wasn’t ready.
The guy is obviously an asshole.
So in the absence of other evidence, its ok to accept anything, even bad evidence, as the truth?
He’s disputing that the evidence he offered is bad. You offhandedly dismissed claims of self-defense use of guns as “fantasy”, without offering any real justification for that- other than your disdain for the whole pro-gun side.
I can think of at least one other problem with using defensive gun uses as a measure of the value of guns in self protection. In a GQ thread Chimera mentioned six different occasions where he warded off criminals by showing a weapon. In none of them did he have to discharge a weapon. Based on that set of data, why not just use a replica?
Legally justified homicides with a firearm have the advantage of knowing that an operational firearm was required and eliminates some of the problems with using survey data. BigAppleBucky did an analysis of CDC data. There’s just not very many such homicides compared to just plain murders.
How could a blind person use a gun to defend against an attack by people with guns? Far better to restrict the gun supply by making them illegal, so criminals find it much harder to get hold of them.
I’m so glad I live in a country that doesn’t have a constitution, where ancient, obsolete laws, written in, and for, another age, can be scrapped with a simple act of parliament.
Possibly; there’s also Mexico, which has strict gun laws and plenty of crime AND tyranny. And before you give the stock answer- it’s all the USA’s fault- consider the following hypothetical: it would be trivially easy for the Russian mafia to flood the British islands with guns; yet so far at least they haven’t. Unless British smuggling control is vastly more effective than on this side of the water, the only difference I can think of is that the demand simply isn’t there. Banning guns might give you another Japan or Britain- or it might give you another Mexico.
If the other guy has one, you are up the proverbial creek without a means of propulsion.
Which of the countries you mention does the US most resemble?
Maybe. I’m just drawing conclusions from the anecdotes that Chimera volunteered in a thread about statistics.
What is the fear of “Assault Rifles” based on? They are scary looking, they hold many cartridges, or they are attractive to crazy people?
With eight years of Republicans, I’d have to say Mexico.
None of the items are simply self-reported.
Yep, heck earlier this Summer I couldn’t even successfully report being the victim of a Pedestrian hit and run. The police had no interest in taking a report seeing as a head injury had impaired my ability to give a good description of a driver.
The only time I ever had them file a report on a burglary was when I actively detained the thief.
For me, at least, it’s the latter (and a bit of the second). It seems (based on probably faulty memory, not any sort of rigorous study) that the type of of person that does these mass shootings tends to prefer the paramilitary appearance - they are acting out a scenario they have played out many times in their heads.
Would they be happy using a deer rifle with a wooden stock if a military-styled weapon weren’t available? I honestly don’t know.
The larger magazine just incrementally increases the potential carnage. And has very little utility since you don’t need 30 rounds to take down a deer and I’m hard-pressed to imagine why squeezing off 30 shots at the range is more fulfilling than 10.