Wisconsin Rep. suggests allowing guns in schools

The BBQ Pit
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I was going to rant today about teachers who call in sick daily for weeks at a time, instead of allowing the school to know there is an ongoing medical issue and letting the school figure out a long term plan. 8 weeks, 11 subs, and no lesson plans, is not good for the kids and is damn hard on the 12th sub. So anyway that was the rant I planned talking about until, on the way home I heard about WI Rep. Frank Lassee’s brilliant idea for making schools safer.

This guy wants to have teachers carry guns in schools. The degree of fucking nuts this is is hard to explain. In the inner city high school I taught in last year, with a grand total of 250 students, and several former military as staff, this is the list of things stolen from classrooms last year (Probably not complete):

7 cell phones (One teacher lost two)
1 set of car keys
1 camera
10 movies
1 Purse
1 car (Not related to the car keys listed above)
Cables for the video camera
8 elevator keys
Remote for off brand Dvd player
Multitudes of batteries
350$ (Approximatly and not all in one chunk)
One set of building keys, (These came back)
Inumerable pens, pencils, markers (they really liked the indeleble ones)
Mice for several of the computers
Grade Book

And this fucker wants us to have guns?

I suppose we could wear them all the time. Hmm Me, 45 year old smallish female in kind of bad shape, him, 16 years old 6’5" 250 and high… Who gets to keep the gun? I can intimidate the hell out of him, until such time as we head into brute force. He knows that game, and I can’t win.

Maybe I can keep it in my desk… Um no. I once locked my keys in my desk. One of my students got it open for me in less time that it would take me to open it with a key.

The simple fact of the matter is, there are more of them than there are of us. Sometimes a class can have 40 kids to one teacher. If we start an arms race, teachers can’t win. Classes have to be kept under control by old good old fashioned intimidation, and expecting that you will be listened to. If you add a gun, they sense you are weak. There is no way to win at that point.

Three of my students last year were shot. Several of my students had burried friends or relatives due to violence. They are still safer in school than they are at home or on the streets. I think we need to improve from there, not up the anti.

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Sorry, didn’t spot that this was in a different forum…
One which allows me to call that buttfuck-state hick a moronic cunt :slight_smile:

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Think his intent is not for the guns to be used to intimidate students, but to be available incase some random wacko decides to shoot up the place. If one of the teachers at the Amish school had been armed, some of those kids might be alive today. Don’t think I’d advocate issuing sidearms to every faculty member, but I wouldn’t object to some of them being properly trained and armed.

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Yeah, but there’s a reason why the prison guards mixed in with the population don’t carry guns, it’s too easy for them to be taken away. Is the plan to put the faculty who have been issued firearms up on the wall? Cause that’ll cost extra, what with building the wall and everything.

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I still believe that my proposal for a small number of teachers to receive gun safety training and be designated ‘marshals’ in each school, coupled with a biometric gun safe in a reasonably safe room such as the teacher’s lounge, holds merit. It really is the only way I can think of to deal with unpredictable events such as these.

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The purse was stolen from a locked desk in the teachers lounge. If you have ever had kids, you understand that they know where everything is, from the tape to the ribbon to your chocolates, the only exceptions being their homework, schoolbooks and the note you gave them for their teacher. Multiply that by a schoolful.

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A prison population is a whole lot different ballgame than a school despite the occasional paralell.

I have no problem with the basic premise, but I think it should be voluntary. Mandatory appointment of a few teachers to be the wacko on campus rapid deployment force sounds like a formula for disaster. Small gun safes like this Bolted down in a cabinet somewhere in the room for the teachers who want the option to have a weapon available.

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I contend that the reason their are so many school shootings is that the killers are basically assured that no one there can fight back as there are (1) no guns and (2) mostly small people.

Hence I support the measure, provided that the guns are concealed and the measure is voluntary in all respects; e.g., a teacher can carry or not, and decide to try to be a hero or not - neither is compulsory and is in principle secret as well.

The important thing isn’t that the teacher has a gun and can shoot a baddie, it’s that a teacher might have a gun and thus the baddie may think twice about the spree.

Under such a scheme, most schools would probably have 0 guns, same as now. But no one could be sure. Same general idea as the air marshal program, same idea as allowing CCW among the general populace.

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Well then you’ll have to expalin why there are so few school shootings in the UK, where no teacher (or beat policeman) has a gun.

Don’t most school shooters end up killing themselves?
Why would they be bothered about a possible gun?

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You said this in another thread on the topic, where you mentioned that a bioemtric gun safe would cost nearly $500. How many schools are there in the US, and who would pay for it?
What if the designated teacher ‘marshal’ is absent, or on a school trip?

As for other ways to deal with it, there are **at least ** two:

UK model :- ban guns
Swiss model: mandatory military training for all males; buying a gun requires proof of sanity and no criminal record; all ammunition sales registered; all guns serially marked

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What, honestly, is the expected marginal value of such a policy? How many students would be saved per year?

Really, if you find yourself in a place where the teachers are armed, it’s time to fucking move.

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As I see it, it’s not about detering potenial attackers. It’s about having the ability to put one down if needed.

I’d agree that it should be strictly voluntary, with rigorous training required.

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Part of me wishes I could be confident of the teacher’s ability with rigorous training, Oakminister, but I just can’t. Maybe I’ve seen too many stories involving misuse of firearms by police officers to believe that a teacher could ever hope to be completely trustworthy with a firearm, at least within a school.

Yes, I know that the above story is kind of a special case in a specific area, but then again, who of us hasn’t read horror stories like this pertaining to officers all over the country? Bear in mind that these are cops. They eat, sleep and breathe with their firearms. Not even marine riflemen have the amount of training these guys do with their weapons and even they fuck up. I can’t believe that a teacher whose primary training involves teaching the quadratic formula to bored seventh graders is going to outperform a police officer, especially when I think back to how flakey some of my teachers were.

Arming teachers in school is a really, really good way to double the number of gunshot fatalities in a short time, especially if these teachers are in crime-ridden school districts. School shootings are a problem. Arming teachers is not the solution.

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I need to suggest to you that you are either missing the full stock of Elgins, or you haven’t been in a classroom since you left it. My kids will fight over anything. They will fight over someone looking at them wrong. They will fight because they wanted that glue stick. They will fight because they are bored, because it is monday or because it is raining. It is a constant tinderbox. Little things can blow up fast and be gone and done with in a heartbeat. For a gun to be of any use, it would have to be there, not locked up somewhere. That means carried. That leads us to my other point.

It is exactly as Bill Door said earlier about prison guards not carrying among the prison population. As a matter of fact, there are a number of our kids who are kind of between prison stays, and my school is by no means one of the worst.

We do need to come up with ways to deal with the recent spate of school shootings, but I would like to contend that the idea that force can solve everything is what got us to this point in the first place.

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Hey! We have these exact people in our school every day. They are called cops.

PS I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that this legislator is a Republican.

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Glee, the UK model will not happen in the US. As for a $500 safe… it’s money, but it’s not too bad. It’d have to come out of the operating budget, and something else would suffer for a year.
furlibusea, I know how kids can break into things. And that’s why I specified a biometric safe
http://www.lock-depot.com/scripts/prodview.asp?idProduct=211
Here’s one for $279. It’s not too bad.

As far as ‘the marshal being missing’, that’s why I was suggesting more than one, maybe.
It’s a low economic value. There is a very small chance of a school shooting happening in any one school. It’d be almost as statistically effective to just do nothing and let them happen.

But that’s just effing wrong. I honestly can’t think of any way to stop it other than a cop on duty at every school, or armed teachers. Having a few teachers who can get access to a gun is pretty much the minimum possible defense that might do some good against a shooter. At least, the minimum possible I can think of. Anyone got a better one?

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furlibusea, if it was even vaugely economically possible for every school to have a cop or two on duty, I’d go for it. But look how glee’s squealing over a possible $500 expenditure.

I wish I could think of a better solution. Inner city schools, troubled schools have a better solution, but not all schools can keep that up.

So… for the smaller districts, I don’t think it’s that bad an idea.

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So let me see if I’ve got this straight. I’m an English teacher at your typical rural/semi-rural school, much like the scene of this latest tragedy. I’ve been teaching the same thing for the past thirteen years, and this morning, I’ve got 30 bored eighth-graders whom I’m trying to teach the concept of indirect objects to. They’re bored and tired, I’m bored and tired, and life goes on. Suddenly, someone breaks into school with a gun. They’ve been planning this attack for a week, and they’ve been smoking PCP and listening to death metal to get themselves in the mood.

Are you seriously suggesting that I’m going to pull myself out of my stupor quickly enough to go for my holstered weapon, draw it, aim it at Mr. Dead-Letter-Office and put two rounds in his center mass before he begins hosing the entire room with an Uzi? Remember that this is a task regularly screwed up by actual cops who–theoretically, at least–are supposed to be on mental point 100% of the time.

What if I screw up? What if Johnny, the tenth grade burnout made a toy gun out of wood in shop class and painted it black because he was almost bored sober that morning, and he’s pointing it in at a few girls in the hallway and laughing. I walk out of the teacher’s lounge with my trusty glock in my shoulder holster and see him doing this. My training tells me that I have maybe a second to react. What do you think is going to happen?

What if I’m walking down the hall and some future Allenwood shower-room sweetheart decides that he doesn’t like the fact that I gave him detention for smoking in the school parking lot and comes up behinds me and beans me with Johnny’s wooden guy, before I have a chance to react. Now Allenwood’s got my glock.

What if I miss a potential attacker and put a round through an innocent bystander?

What if I’m the principal, and I accidentally give a glock to a teacher who makes Johnny Burnout look like a charter member of the Rotary Club in comparison. Oh yeah, those teachers are out there, and they’re not always easy to spot.

The simple truth is that no one with the ability to anticipate and deal with this sort of crisis using a firearm is going to be a teacher. They’re going to be in the infantry or SWAT or maybe walking a beat in uniform, and even then they might mess up with bad results.

I’m telling you, Sabbath, you’d do better to arm the students in this scenario. This “solution” is worse than the problem.

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Oops, that was Frostillicus in the second post, #18.