What do we need besides guns? MORE guns!
This would be my feelings on it, I’ve elucidated the controls I think we need elsewhere, but I’m not opposed to looking into the cost of having a police officer on site.
It’d be one shift per day, schools aren’t open longer than that. I know some communities I’m familiar with around here, some of the wealthier ones, we have a lot of police per capita and a lot of them appear to spend a lot of time doing much of nothing. I think those communities, which typically have maybe 5 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, and 1 High School, could conceivably do this with no additional hiring and we’d probably be getting more work out of the officers in question. Now for a lot of cities obviously the police departments are chronically underfunded and thus undermanned. But it’s worthwhile to explore to at least see the feasibility I think.
There are a number of schools around here that have police on duty at least part of the time, but they are high schools, and my impression has always been that they are there to deal with internal/community issues, and not as a means of effective protection against an attack on the school.
I second the impracticality of trained, armed enforcers at every public school as a method of keeping people safe, both in terms cost and relative effectiveness.
Getting into a cold war with domestic crazies is one of the scariest ideas to come across the pike in a while.
Knew this was what they were going to announce.
Even “volunteers” would require tremendous resources to vett, train, schedule and coordinate.
With or without volunteers, my question to the mostly very Conservative and Tea Party leaders of the NRA (of which I am a member) are;
- Do you support tax increases to pay for this?
- Are you in favor of making this an unfunded Federal mandate?
a. Or should this be left up to the individual states to decide? - What qualifications do you endorse for these individuals? What kinds of background checks, what kind of training, what kind of equipment?
- Who pays for all of that?
And then for them and the rest of ‘my’ :rolleyes: leadership;
- Are you even obliquely aware of the Law of Unintended Consequences?
- Do you honestly believe that one armed guard in every school will stop all incidents cold and there will never be another school shooting?
- Are you completely fucking insane? Or just really stupid?
I think he was talking about the cost to the whole country, based on volunteer guards. Of course, that’s a delusional number.
Maybe this idea deserves some serious attention.
How are we going to pay for it?
Let’s say the price of a gun is a nice round number, like $500. So, I think a $1,000 tax on it sounds fair. Probably a $1 tax per bullet.
Sell this “keep the kids safe” tax to your members NRA, then we’ll talk.
Well, out here, most schools have one main gate which is open during school hours. You post your guard there. And, since many schools already have one, for other reasons, it’s not so bad.
And, we have been registering gun *sales *for five decades now.
I’d rather spend money on that then some elaborate and unnecessary ‘sex ed’ when we can just cover all that in Biology class.
And …a lot of suburb based schools already have security guards, even if they are unarmed, either train them and keep them on payroll, or replace them with men who are actually healthy and professional.
If I have to see another fat Gabriel Iglesias security guard riding around in a golf cart I think I’m going to write some state governers.
Martin, the issue is that you have officers who do pretty much nothing but guard a school. One officer can’t rotate and maintain adequate coverage.
My town has 11 schools, so that’s 11 officers right off the bat. Either they take 11 officers off of their normal duties, or hire 11 more. If they could take them off without affecting police coverage, they should already have done it. Since they’re fighting for every tax dollar to upgrade systems and maintain a full complement of officers, the extra expenditure can probably be better used on systems or feet on the street, instead of feet patrolling an elementary school where the biggest crime is eating paste.
This just proves that the leadership of the NRA are so crazy that they shouldn’t be trusted with guns.
First, one cop per school is not enough. What happens when he has a break? Are all these volunteers going to be so professional, and so on alert, that they stagger breaks?
And I hope he stays behind a bunker the whole day. When the crazy attacked the Holocaust Museum, the first thing he did was kill the guard. Do they all wear bullet proof vests?
Volunteers? Who the fuck is going to have time to volunteer all day every day at schools. Unless you want to trust the safety of your kids to gun-loving 75-year-olds. They’d stand up well in a firefight.
Our elementary schools - and our high schools - are built on open plans. The campus has many entrances, and many buildings. Not only that, several of the houses next to the field have gates that open onto the school athletic field. I guess we can build barbed wire around the whole place - and ruin the property values of houses across the street. And just rename PS 54 to Stalag 54.
Everyone else has handled the money angle pretty well.
I only heard a bit of the press conference, but Wayne got one thing right. There are definitely monsters out there. He knows this from looking in the mirror every morning.
Not in Fremont. Every school I’ve been to - and I’ve been to a good many - has multiple ways in.
Well they had an armed policeman at Columbine, so it didn’t seem to help much.
This doesn’t change at all what I said. The school district I’m speaking of has 11 buildings, miles apart from each other. You can’t post one guard at one gate, to cover more than one school. You need 11 guards to have one in each school.
Sales, some of them, not all. Registering owners, the NRA actively opposes.
A spokesman from our city schools talked about our security a day or so after the school shooting. She said all the entrances to the schools are protected with cameras. There’s a guard inside that monitors all the cameras. I imagine at most they have maybe 3 or 4 guards in a school. You need enough that they can monitor the cameras in shifts.
Elementary schools should be easier to secure. I’d hope that there’s no need for metal scanners or bag searches. Not with kids 6 thru 10. You just need cameras watching the entrances and a couple guards to respond. More secure doors on the classrooms would basically turn each classroom into a “safe room”. If a bad guy got in, then all he could do is roam the hallways until the cops arrived. I recall my school was cinderblock and even the interior walls were made of the stuff. That’s already bullet resistant. Some kind of electronic lock would be useful. Something that could be triggered centrally and all the classrooms lock at once.
Just put a tax on ammo to pay for the army of armed security guards the NRA says we need. If guns are the problem, make guns pay for the solution.
You’ve been to my kids’ school?
I think the main problem is most of these shooters aren’t planning on getting away with anything. It’s a one way suicide mission, so kill the guard and continue on your rampage. When someone robs a bank, they are planning on living, and probably don’t want a murder rap (or just might not want to kill anyone), so an armed guard is a huge deterrent.
True, a guard might be able to put an earlier end to a rampage if they’re not the first one shot, but I don’t feel they will be a deterrent to a deranged mind wanting to execute children.
FTR, I believe our high schools each have a full time officer (how bad do you have to screw up to pull that duty), and the other schools seem to have officers stopping by randomly and during the beginning and end of the school day. They only have one point of entry once the school day starts.
The officer at my daughter’s school is nicknamed Officer Golf Cart, and he really, really does not come across as the best and the brightest, nor does he seem like he would deter any motivated child with an assault weapon.
OK. Add the money needed to make every school a fortress to the NRA’s tab. Since adults would be allowed to enter–having convinced the guards watching the cameras–metal detectors would be needed. In Texas, I’ve heard of little kids bringing weapons to school–in an idiotic “show & tell” way rather than as killers. Another reason for metal detectors. How much does a good one cost?
Be sure the wrong guy doesn’t get his hands on the electric locks!
Well if the NRA is asked to pay, perhaps they could require each student become a member of the NRA to help defray the costs. The guard could also be a teacher of gun safety and 2nd Amendment history.
Eventually they could get to a solution like the Gingrich school janitor proposal - just arm the students - sounds like Texas might leading the way :eek:
Actually, it seems crazies are the problem. Tax anti-psychotic meds?
What, so fewer people who need them can afford to take them? 