If a former infantryman with an honorable discharge, a clean record, and a clear psych evaluation, or a plainclothes police officer with SWAT training, were to be assigned to work as a security advisor and be present at the school each day, then I believe that individual has a chance at stopping a school shooter. Otherwise, I am highly skeptical.
If they can work out some kind of program where that would actually be implemented, I’m OK with that. As for the odds of that happening, I am also skeptical.
“even one who has had the kind of tactical training available to civilians”? Really? I think there are a bunch of Front Sight defensive handgun graduates who would beat the ass of any of the recent school shooters seven days a week. It’s not like any of them (the recent school shooters) have been “a police officer with SWAT training or a former infantryman who has deployed” either.
Well said, Barack Obama. I’m not sure how you get the gun-genie back in the bottle at this point, but for the vast majority of Americans except those in law enforcement, a gun is not a necessity. It never really was. If a homicidal person had something even bigger and more deadly than an AR-15 handy, I imagine they would use that instead. Armed with a pocket knife, they would only get so far before being apprehended. Plus, many knifing victims live afterwards.
Are we still talking about the universe where everyone is armed? In that case your Rambo will be shot by four innocent bystanders. Two of those will have been trying to shoot a third innocent bystander, and six other people will have shot at Rambo and missed, two of which will have hit yet other innocent bystanders. Note that all the bystanders except Rambo are freaking out during this whole process.
That said, the attacker will probably go down eventually. He may even kill a good half of the people who die in the incident!
I’m not. I thought that particular piece of the OP (“all”) was dumb. No one is proposing we arm everyone, at least AFAIK. I just think it’s also dumb to suggest that no one but a SWAT officer or infantrymen has a chance against the average school shooter. The average school shooter is not particularly bright, or skilled with a weapon. They certainly don’t, on average, have any sort of tactical training.
What did this last one do after he finished shooting up the school? Did he move on to his devious and crafty E&E plan? No. He went to Subway and bought a fucking soda.
I get the impression that school shooters generally do alright for themselves in the “shooting people” department - tactical training or not.
Regarding the Rambo fantasy, I will freely concede that there are probably military grade civilian training programs that grant you nerves of steel, a steady hand, and an immunity to bullets that a police officer would envy. However I don’t believe that a statistically significant percentage of the population has attended such a program. The average yahoo with a gun will be a little too busy shitting his pants to detect the threat, whip out his pistol, and coolly line up a shot between the eyes before the (initial) shooter can rack up a body count.
All that said, if there are enough guns in enough people’s hands somebody is going to shoot the shooter sooner or later. And then probably start shooting each other, because it’s not like these civilian commandos are wearing uniforms to identify themselves to each other as good guys or anything.
Here’s the mistake you’re making: No statistically significant percentage of the school shooters have attended military grade training programs, have nerves of steel, a steady hand, and an immunity to bullets that a police officer would envy, and yet they “do alright for themselves in the shooting people department”. They are just, to use your words “the average yahoo with a gun” too. Well, assuming that the teachers are also just average, it’s not a “Rambo fantasy” to say that when two untrained individuals end up in a gunfight, the bad guy is not going to win all of them.
The shooter has a clear advantage, because they not only have the element of surprise and have had hours to prepare themselves for this moment, they also came to school that day expecting a gunfight. I realize that you might start every day prepared to kill somebody, but I don’t think that’s the norm.
And if it’s known that all the teachers are packing, then the shooter knows who to target first. You can be reasonably certain that the first teacher confronted won’t know what hit him.
I really hate how people say ‘culture’ is the difference and then completely fail to actually address the real cultural differences. If the USA has a different social contract than die Schweiz, and we get different and worse results than they do from the same proportion of firearms in the populace as they have, then giving us the same proportion of firearms is not such a great idea.
I think most Yanks who want guns for themselves and use the ‘culture’ excuse are trying to convince us that they, somehow, in isolation, are trustworthy gun owners, and that their strong religious upbringing or something is a reasonable substitute for actually being indoctrinated and regulated as part of a militia. Well, it’s not.
To outsiders, the Vegas shooter looked exactly like the folks we’re expected to trust, until he started spraying the crowd.
(ETA: Sadly, some people seem to think that being white and speaking the right dialect and going to the right church are enough cultural markers for society to allow some individual his own personal gun. If that’s what you mean by ‘culture,’ you are exactly wrong.)
And that isn’t even the real problem. If everyone is trying to be a hardened killer, carrying a gun and ready to protect themselves when it’s time…who are they going to see as the biggest threat? Oh, that’s right, everyone else. If everyone has a gun, anyone you see might be able to draw on you and blow you away. Maybe you should pull your gun first.
It’s bad enough when every police officer carries a gun and a license to kill. Oddly, when you give lots of people a gun and a license to kill, they use it. In practice, such liberal “carry anywhere and stand your ground” laws start to amount to the same thing.
Could we examine this belief of yours for a moment? Just two questions to start things off:
Looking back at the past several decades, would you say that our “carry anywhere and stand your ground” laws / “license[s] to kill” have become more prevalent or less?
What has happened to gun violence during that same time period? Has it gone up? Or down?
Well, police have an actual license to kill* as recent news has shown. As for gun crimes, you would need to be willing to consider them relative to overall crimes. No fair saying “gun crimes are less” if they are a greater percentage of crimes relative to the total crime rate. The total crime rates has been dropping.
*only in the most ridiculously extreme cases do they get convicted.
Is it possible that the other part of “culture” that we’re ignoring is the part that creates the homicidal killers in the first place? What was his school experience? Why did he feel the only way to draw attention to what he likely felt was his mistreatment at that school previously was to go on a killing spree? I’m concerned about the kind of conditions students live with that would make one of them see a mass killing as the only solution. It wasn’t a murder-suicide; he planned to get away by blending in. It worked too, at least for a while. I don’t suppose the attraction of first-person shooter games for teenagers has any bearing…
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
I’m sorry. I, at least, have let my responses fall back into the same old general gun control argument.
No, it probably isn’t stupid to arm all a country’s citizens, if you actually train them to work as a militia, in a communitarian way.
Yes, it is very stupid, in an individualistic culture like the USA, to arm a bunch of unorganized individuals with no oversight or cooperation, and just let them go out and play at being the Punisher or Al Capone. If you want to interpret that as “Yanks are too dumb to have guns,” okay, but I think the problem is that we’re not also training and indoctrinating the populace to work as a community. We do not have a well-regulated militia. Switzerland definitely does. That is the difference.
We’ve been handing out CCW licenses in an ever-increasing frenzy over the last 30 years. States all across the country have been liberalizing their concealed-carry laws. Citizens have been practically hoarding guns and ammunition. If there’s one thing both the left and the right agree about, it’s that Americans have gun fever, and bad.
You said “Oddly, when you give lots of people a gun and a license to kill, they use it.”
If that were true, one might expect that, among all these people who have acquired guns and CCW licenses, gun violence might go up. But instead we’ve found the opposite. Gun violence has gone down, and dramatically. Does that information cause you to reconsider your claim (“when you give lots of people a gun and a license to kill, they use it”)?
If over 3 million teachers carry guns, how many additional murders and suicides will take place by virtue of having so many additional guns in schools?
I love the way conservatives use any convenient circumstance to posit ridiculous cause-and-effect theories. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to support their agenda.
Do more guns result in more gun violence? Academic studies prove the obvious, that of course they do. But what gun nuts like to talk about is places like Vermont – lots of guns per capita, and not a lot of gun violence, and never mind that it’s a sleepy rural state with more wolves than people. Or Switzerland, never mind that guns there are so tightly regulated that it would give the average NRA nutter conniption fits.
Same with gun violence trends. It has gone down, not because of CCW licenses being issued, but for a variety of reasons including the powerful driver of changing demographics that has reduced crime rates across the board in all western democracies – all those countries (and all the non-western ones) that don’t have a lot of guns and don’t have a lot of gun problems and never did.
Is it unreasonable for me to just ask my fellow Canadians to just fuckng give up on this argument with Americans? It’s over. There will be no meaningful change in gun control in America in your lifetime. It’s over. All we can do is stop it at the border as best we can.
