But school shootings are a sub-set of gunshot fatalities for children, which is now the leading cause of death for under-18s in the US. Shouldn’t measures be taken to try to reduce that leading cause of death, including that particular sub-set?
Exactly, gun deaths in the US are also extremely high across demographics in the US. It’s a public health crisis, of which school shootings is a small segment.
It would depend on circumstances. A motor vehicle accident is almost always on a roadway and more immediately accessible. A shooting incident may leave victims unreachable until the situation is resolved thus delaying treatment.
WAG-gunshot wounds are also more invasive (?) in general.
Are you saying it’s a recent crisis?
No, I’m saying it is a crisis, one made worse by gun manufactures who stoke racist fears of whites to ensure we do nothing to address it. Show me where I said it was a recent crisis.
It’s like we’ve put NAMBLA in charge and we wonder why our kids keep getting cornholed.
Do you have evidence of this? I’m not talking about an isolated ad. I’d like to know if there’s a systematic effort by gun manufacturers to stoke racist fears in people.
The NRA, the lobbying arm of gun manufacturers has a long history of using racism to sell gun ownership. This is well documented and if you want to start a debate on that, start a separate thread. There are some links below to get you started on your journey.
Back to the politics of this problem, I think that we are past the point of reasonable discussion with gun rights activists. Reasonable gun owners are already in favor of sane gun policies as reflected in popular support for some gun control policies. What’s left on the other side is a lunatic fringe who will never be convinced and I think that a more effective strategy is to portray them as weirdos who are ultimately facilitators of murder. It’s similar to how we eventually made smoking uncool enough that people just saw the people who did still smoke differently, they went from sophisticated, to some loser standing in the rain outside their workplace.
The international kinder garden I send my daughter to has only two entrances and exits right next to each other. The entrance and exit for kids is like a garage door and is open for ten minutes during the span of school start time and the span of school end time. The other entrance is a camera monitored solid door with no windows that if you want to enter you have to press a button and announce who you are and your intentions over intercom. The playground is on the roof, three floors up and fenced in.
You can harden the schools without guns. You aren’t living in the 1950s anymore and you need to get used to it or change your laws.
What you describe violates fire code, unless you’re leaving out information about additional exit-only fire exits. There must always be exit routes in two directions, so that the fire cannot trap you inside by blocking the only way out.
It’s in Japan, so which fire codes are those?
If the layout would violate your own local fire codes, couldn’t you re-imagine a layout that would not do so?
I’m trying to figure out how having just one entrance would even be helpful in an active shooting. The shooter could just sit there and pick off anyone trying to escape.
Who said one entrance?
Who is escaping from a protected building while there in an active shooter outside?
I think it’s been mentioned here, but one of the most dissuasive arguments against most of the ‘building hardening’ approaches to curb the tragic loss from school shootings is …
Unless you create attached/underground parking garages and bus every single child to/from school (in … Up-armored Humvees ?) … there will be a defined time where they arrive at (and enter) and leave from the school.
Which ‘preserves’ the ‘fish in a barrel’ element that we’re desperately trying to solve.
Even recess – unless it’s confined to interior courtyards and playgrounds not visible from public spaces – puts a concentrated number of kids in a vulnerable position at a time.
Armed officers at each school seems wrongheaded for no end of reasons – not the least of which is the length of time it takes these school shooters to kill the number of kids they kill.
Unless you have a relatively small facility and the armed officer happens to be fairly close to the ‘action,’ the amount of damage that can be done is still devastating.
Even more so on, for example, university campuses where you’d pretty much have to arrive at a ratio of armed officers per square foot of enclosed campus buildings and or open campus area.
In terms of arming teachers (or other civilians): we constantly hear no end of alarming failure stories of LE professionals who are highly trained, well equipped, and well compensated. Replacing these people with – effectively – totally untrained amateurs seems unwise at best.
Upstream solutions seem far more cost effective to me, and I am one who favors putting all social determinants of violence on the white board and talking about each.
But we have to rank them in terms of cost, benefit, and the likely time it would take to derive those benefits. Things without an immediate payoff should absolutely not be taken off the table. This shitstorm was a long time coming. It’s time we work on the systemic problems and the lethal symptoms.
Hardening carries the problem experienced here. If the shooter gets in, the hardening is in his favor.
As one who served on a volunteer fire department decades ago, I would submit that firefighters know this at least as well as police departments do.
Though the person(s) securely ensconced inside usually gets the worse end of the deal.
Cite where that has ever happened?
Agreed, and it seems that the solution need not be costly. Due diligence would have done more than defensive weapons.
Uvalde - the defense was doors that locked from the inside and windows with aluminum bars. The shooter was secure once he got inside and locked the door.
It just seems like compromising the ability to evacuate in the event of fire in order to make it slightly harder for an active shooter to enter the building is a really bad tradeoff.
Yes, you could have multiple fire exits that have no entry hardware. This all seems like it’s barking up the wrong tree, though. You turn the school into a prison and don’t actually gain much in terms of preventing entry by would-be shooters. Probably they can still force their way through the front door or a window, unless the entire ground floor is built as a fortress. Absolute best case the shooter has to alter their plans to murder lots of children by attacking them somewhere other than school.