This is a bad, bad idea. Armed guards will only deter spur-of-the-moment criminals, like the guy off the street who just wants to walk in and start shooting people. Not people who invest in body armor, such as Adam Lanza and James Holmes. An armed guard would have most likely been another victim to Adam Lanza and James Holmes. Even if there were an armed guard, Adam Lanza and James Holmes or any other future mass murderer will just pack bigger heat. It’ll become like the Cold War - a mutual arms race. Give the armed guard a revolver. Mass murderer comes in packing a semiautomatic handgun. Give the armed guard a handgun. Mass murderer comes in with a AR15. And so on.
I mean, just look at it. James Holmes felt the need to dress up in full SWAT gear in confronting a group of movie goers. If he knew there were an armed guard at the movie theater … then what the hell would he have gone into the movie theater wearing/packing?
We had a resource officer in my Middle School, he was armed, and we never gave him a second thought until he was charged with statutory rape of an 8th grader and also got one of the Middle School teachers pregnant. Stand up guy
If you really believe that, I think you’re dramatically out of step with the culture. Everybody I know, and every public comment I’ve seen above the message-board level, has seen this massacre as different than any previous (in living memory). There’s a reason this one feels to be impelling the country to do something.
I think if one believes in the 2nd Amendment individual right to bear arms and just the general idea of the right to self-defense, and incorporates the idea of gun ownership into that concept- I find that pretty hard to reconcile that with advocating a big-government statist approach like this one ( expanding the number of armed domestic state agents of violence).
Cops and other armed state agents are frequently the most dangerous individuals that non-violent innocent citizens will ever encounter. As it is, they are allowed to use force and terrorize individuals with impunity. So, let’s expand that. Let’s extend the amount of violence our children are exposed to and create more violence in order to…uh, combat violence?
Of course, the NRA is not exactly an org that advocates for individual rights, just when convenient politically. And their record and rhetoric on gun rights for individuals is not that good. They just like guns, I guess. Not people or rights.
Well, when I was in college a fellow killed another fellow with a gun from the shooting gallery, so we can start with one firing a .22 Short and go up from there. The most shocking thing is that the guy he killed was the same guy he was aiming at, a full ten feet away. Never heard of a shooting-gallery rifle that accurate.
Subtracting Israel from my list of retirement destinations.
I actually have yet another long, pointless story to go with that, but I’ll skip it this time. Happy holidays!
Public perception is not the same thing as objective facts. Twenty unnecessary deaths is 20 unnecessary deaths whether those 20 unnecessary deaths occured at a school or at mall or at stadium. That is objective fact.
People see this massacre as different because of emotional reactions towards children, but emotions are not what we should be basing public policy on. If thinking this makes me out-of-step with society, I can live with that.
An M4 is a reasonably long ranged weapon. I’m a clumsy idiot, and with a C7 - a similar weapon - I could hit a six to eight inch target at 200 metres with pretty much every shot. I thik I hit the range 12, 15 times my entire time in the army. That’s how easy they are to use, how accurate they are. The M4 can’t be AS accurate, since it has a shorter barrel, but it doesn’t have to be. All Adam Lanza had to do was get out of his car 100-150 yards from the door, wait for Paul Blart to come outside for his morning round, and plug him. Paul would never know what hit him.
As evidenced by Columbine, a guard is of questionable value, and my scenario is quite realistic for any shooter with an ounce of foresight. Oh, and how do we know the 100,000+ guards we arm aren’t going to INCLUDE the next Adam Lanza?
In objective fact, this and all other spree killings combined are statistically minuscule. If we’re going to purge our emotions before making policy, Newton and Aurora will have no impact whatsoever. But then of course we also wouldn’t throw around emotional words like “tragic.”
So apparently the NRA believes that an armed guard is bullet proof. If someone is going to take the time to plan a mass killing, does anybody really think the shooter is not going to figure out how to neutralize some 300 pound rent-a-cop in an ill-fitting uniform?
And they apparently think that teachers and college kids should be armed, according to some wanker who was on Chris Matthews tonight. There’s a good plan. Quick now: picture the teachers you had over the years and try to imagine all of them packing heat. I can just see old Mrs. Buchanan, my Latin teacher in the polka dot dress, walking around strapped and confronting some guy with an AR15. And college kids? Who the fuck thinks this is a good idea? A bunch of boozing pot-smokers with girl problems having access to firearms? Really?
You do realize though that NRA is adamant on NOT closing the individual-sales loophole. So we really need the responsible gun owners to do as you and say, NRA does not speak for us, we support every sale being recorded, universal and unavoidable background check, and more investment in mental health.
What a weird response. I thought gun-rights supporters were all about personal freedom from the police state. And yet the NRA is suggesting we literally create more of a police state by putting armed guards in all schools. I guess they really do love guns more than freedom.
Ooohh you’re right. I propose we immediately modify school buses to add gun turrets, like an old B-17. Any vehicle that appears to be careening out of control towards the bus…blammo with the 50 cals!
Since there’s even more buses than schools, we need even more people. I further propose we only hire 60+ year-olds. This will allow us to raise the Medicate & Social Security age since they all have employment. This also means that we are saving billions upon trillions of taxpayer dollars on these entitlement programs.
Finally, a significant portion of these new gun users would join the NRA, building their clout, which means only one thing…
Wayne for President! :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Yeah, but the culture is fucked up. The culture is what has given us this situation in the first place. The culture is what has produced the shitty mental health care and the easy access to not just guns but fucking assault rifles and high-capacity clips. If the culture had done something other than tut about how awful it was and then got on with its business after Columbine, or Virginia tech, or Fort Hood, or any of the other massacres that have killed adults and older kids…how many of those kids the culture is now soiling itself over would be at home right now planning what kind of cookies to leave out for Santa?
What makes you think that? I don’t know if you’re serious or not, and whatever one might think of the NRA (or “gun-rights” supporters) that’s a ludicrous strawman.
Probably the constant rhetoric that we need handguns and rifles to protect us from dictatorship, and that the only purpose in restricting weapon ownership is the imposition of tyranny. “Hitler confiscated guns!” and so forth.
Yeah, if your saying you’re a member of the NRA, then I’ve got an idea.
You should write a letter to the Wayne LaPierre saying you support legislation that does just what you said and they should use all their lobbying power FOR it.
I thought my second post about the 200% sales tax would also deter some of that.
And that’s a conservative tax compared to what some people want. Not when they’re looking to raise $15 billion.
But I doubt you want it to come to that, so get to work on that letter.