Linty, I’m not talking about having a gun on any teacher. I’m saying, god forbid that some loon enters a schoolroom and starts shooting or taking hostages, the only thing I can think of that might stop him before he kills too many people is someone on the scene who can shoot back. If I could think of something else, I’d prefer it. But if there’s a gun in the, say, teacher’s lounge, or principal’s office, and a teacher can get to it, and at the least try to keep the guy pinned down by shooting in his direction till the cops get there, maybe fewer people would die.
I keep thinking about how this most recent incident, how the guy seperated the men and the women, and sent the men out.
I know they’re pacifists. I respect them and how they decide to turn the other cheek.
But damnit… those girls are dead. Give me some other solution. Any other solution. I found one that might work. It might cause other problems, but… well, there you go.
Once again, how would this play out IRL? You’re a teacher who hears gunfire in the school. The closest you’ve come to having shots fired at you in anger is when you played Quake with your teenaged kid on that computer you got him last Christmas. Now there’s a madman with an automatic weapon in the school. What are you going to do? Just run down the hall to the teacher’s lounge or principal’s office, unlock it, find the gun, make sure it’s loaded, run back out, and start roaming the halls to find a maniac god knows where armed with god knows what just so you can lay down suppressing fire? With a handgun?? Uh-uh, it just doesn’t work like that.
BTW, the above scenario works as long as no kid doesn’t break into the teacher’s lounge/principal’s office and steals the firearm. If that happens, whoever put the firearm there is going to be in shit that makes getting fired upon by Johnny Crack look like a day at Six Flags.
Well, let’s get something straight. I’m not approaching it from a pacifist’s point of view. I’d be pleased as punch if someone capped the armed maniac before he ended innocent lives. It’s just that I’d prefer a solution which doesn’t involve placing firearms into the hands of people who shouldn’t be using them–which, if you recall, is how tragedies like these arise in the first place.
It would give a teacher a better chance going up against a guy with a gun than they have now. And, yes, it might require paying attention to your surroundings. In fact, I would say that is a good idea for anyone.
Plus, in the recent shootings they have been coming into the classroom, sending some people out, then doing the rest execution-style. He would likely be distracted at some point during the process, giving the teacher the time to take him out. That is where training enters the equation.
You shoot him. Any police officer in that situation would shoot him. He has an object that appears to be a gun, and is behaving in a threatening manner. No jury in the US would convict you. If you don’t think you could handle the aftermath of having to make that decision, then don’t carry a gun. But some teachers are emotionally capable of handling that decision.
This is the beauty of concealed handguns–if you are doing it right, nobody knows that you have it until you need it. You do not talk about it. You use a proper holster for a gun that you know how to use and that you can conceal with your body’s shape and size. The bad guy should not know you have a gun until he is looking down the business end.
The risk of this can never be completely eliminated, but you can reduce the risk. Train with your chosen weapon regularly. Know your target and what is beyond it, and don’t fire if you don’t have a clear shot. Use a quality hollowpoint ammunition to reduce the risk of overpenetration.
Do background checks. Do psychological testing like they do for the pilots that carry in the cockpit.
And I don’t think there has ever been a school shooting by a teacher. Carrying a gun does not make anyone more likely to commit a crime. In fact, the experience in the US has been that a private citizen with a concealed handgun permit is less likely to commit a crime than the average police officer.
I think you underestimate your fellow teachers. What about those who are former cops or military? And many people who are neither of those have the ability to respond to a crisis as well–I’m sure some of them are teachers. Just because you don’t trust your ability to do anything more than curl up in a corner and whimper wgen a crazy guy with a gun bursts into your classroom doesn’t mean no teacher is capable.
Nobody is suggesting that every new teacher be given a pistol and sent off to teach. If I were to design this program, they would have to pass a FBI background check, have a clean psychological history, and pass a psychological exam similar to that given to cops. They would then take a class consisting of 40-50 hours of firearms training–legal implications, weapon retention, lots of range time. This is equivalent to the training that most police officers had in their academy to develop their supposed l33t gun handling skills. They would then have to requalify every 6 months to be allowed to continue to carry.
At the risk of sounding callous, how do you define “so many.” I remember maybe a dozen kids shooting up their schools in the mid to late 90s and these three recent whackjobs. I’m pretty sure your more likely to die from slipping in the shower than in an American school. There are things a school can do (programs to reduce bullying, for example), but at the end of the day, a lot of it is just shitty luck. A program like the one the Congresscritter is proposing will do a lot more harm than good.
Do you know one of the common threads of the school shootings? The majority of these shooters killed themselves or wanted to die during their seige. They were suicidial. What’s the worst thing to do with a suicide? Publicize it. In a bizarre way publicization suicides honors the person who killed themself making the act look attractive to others in those shoes. So what I’m saying is, “STFU, MEDIA! Stop rubbernecking!”
Hirundo82, Jack Bauer may have a BA in English, but he’s not a teacher. I don’t know about other people, but I didn’t go into education for the opportunity to cap baddies. I don’t want that responsibility. I can’t think of anyone in my cohort who would.
This is an overreaction to an issue, horrible that it is, is not going to effect 99.999999999999% of schools. The events of the past week are terrible, semi-random (see my previous post), and hopefully fleeting. Besides, after the shootings of the '90s most schools, in my area anyway, had an officer stationed at the school. Let him do the blasting. I’m just here to teach punks how to read.
I’m always curious about statement like this. How does a gun go from being such an effective weapon in the hands of the bad guy to becoming totally useless in the hands of the good guy?
Sure, but are the gunmen in school shootings magically immune from those screw ups?
Mind you I’m not an advocate for arming teachers. I just don’t understand how if guns are so useful for one side how they can magically become useless for the other.
Neither do the police. They are just supposed to be ready to do it if necessary.
Can you honestly tell me that if you had a gun and a man with a gun burst into your classroom, you would not shoot him if you had the opportunity to do so without hurting any of your students?
Sometimes somebody is going to die and it is simply a question of who. Nobody who is psychiatrically normal wants to kill somebody, but many people have accepted that it is sometimes necessary. This proposal is simply about giving those teachers who can accept that responsibility a tool so there is a chance the bad guy dies before he offs a few students and not afterward.
You can’t always tell who accepts that responsibility. I’m in healthcare, a profession that is not at all associated with that responsibility. I apparently come across as a very gentle, mild-mannered person–I’ve had people tell me “You carry a gun? But you’re so nice!” I simply have seen enough bad things happen that I have faced that it could happen to anyone, and decided that if it comes down to some criminal’s life or mine, I am going to try my best to be sure it is not me who dies.
Ask Sarah Brady. She’s been arguing for years that in the hands of criminals, guns are precise, accurate killing machines but are of absolutely no value at all for self defense because your average person couldn’t possibly fire one without killing bystanders.
Or just look at the difference between the number of fatalities in Littleton, CO and those in Edinboro, PA and Pearl, MS.
For the next six days I’m a systems administrator/college level networking instructor. Where I work, we have numerous students who were in jail or prison, many for violent offenses, some of whom are on house arrest or work release and wear ankle jewelry furnished by the state. One former student is currently on death row.
You bet your ass if one of those little fuckers turned up with a gun, and I had my pistol, I’d do whatever I had to do to protect my own life and the lives of my coworkers and students. I might get killed trying, but I would try.
Would it make more sense to try and ensure the appropriate service (armed response unit etc) shows up in a more timely fashion? Instead of arming the faculty you could have some sort of panic button that alterted the police of an issue immediately.
The police have no affirmative duty to protect any of us. Their job is to investigate crime and arrest those who commit them.
Also, around here, you call for the police, you call for an ambulance, and you call for a pizza. The pizza will arrive first.
No, I want to defend myself. I want a fighting chance at still being alive when the cops show up. I’d rather be telling them that I shot the attacker than having them notify my next of kin.
I’m not sure I understand the question. The good guy and the bad guy have entirely different goals. The bad guy wants to shoot as many people as he can before being brought down. He’s not looking to distinguish between friend and enemy. The good guy only wants to shoot the bad guy. Those are two totally different goals requiring totally different skill sets. It’s not like you have to take the bad guy to the range and train him to only shoot the designated target before turning him loose on a school.
Hirundo82, you seem to have a real case of wishful thinking here. First of all, psychological testing and background checks cost money. Lots of money.
Secondly, paying attention to your surroundings is a good idea, but it only goes so far. Once again, these are firearms we’re talking about. In the best of circumstances, using a firearm against a guy shooting at you in anger in a room full of innocent kids is a nightmare. It takes a whole hell of a lot of training. Drill sergeants happily bellow at their recruits that the gun is just a tool; who gets shot where ultimately comes down to the person firing it, and as for this:
These guys are teachers, Hirundo. They’re not SWAT. They’re not army infantry, and shooting an unarmed person by mistake is going to affect them much more severely psychologically than it would someone in the police or military–whom, I might add are actually severely affected by it as well, despite the on-the-job-risk.
I’m not in favor of total gun control, but you are advocating putting deadly weapons into the hands of people who are not qualified to use them. People who did not spend the better part of their days learning how to properly use these weapons. People who are then going to be around kids in a stressful situation all day. I don’t think you quite realize how dangerous putting a firearm into hands of people not thoroughly in their use is. I also don’t think you realize just how much training goes into training an effective gunfighter.
I’d sure like a solution to the problem of school shooting, too, but this taking a bad situation and making it worse. No matter how you slice it, if you have armed teachers roaming the hallways, sooner or later some innocent kid is going to get capped.
Why not arm teachers with non lethal weapons, stun guns or mace. I appreciate might not be as effective as a handgun but better than nothing and less open for abuse if it did fall into the hands of the pupils.
If they got really bored could turn them on any disruptive pupils
Pretty much, yeah. That’s why I was suggesting we train the teacher, if we can’t get a cop stationed there. The odds are somewhat decent that at least one teacher in any school served in the military at some point, as well. It doesn’t mean they had shots fired at them in anger, but it’s the best training I can think of.
Cause the other option is to let him shoot those kids. I’d rather go in bare handed, if I thought I stood a chance of doing something. Alone, I probably wouldn’t, but if there were three or four people with me, I probably would. Because, in my honest opinion, there are a few things worth giving my life to protect. One of them is children in my care.
Again, I’m open to better ideas, because I don’t think all schools can afford a cop on duty.
For you, and glee I’ll clarify that I mean “so many” as a comparison to other rather congested public places such as shopping malls, casinos, expos, etc… I suppose I could include gun shows as a reductio ad absurdum, I haven’t heard of a shooting spree at one of those, but that’s quite a loaded (pardon the pun) argument to make.
I believe you and I are addressing the same aspect of the issue - the psychology of the shooter. Hard to plumb the mind of a madman, but there seems to be a trend to try to inflict the maximum possible havoc before “going out”.
My point is that the effective guarantee that the shooter will be unopposed is a consideration in the mind of the madman. In the US it’s common to have signs posted near schools that say “Gun Free Zone” or more commonly “Drug Free Zone”, as there’s a law against posessing a gun within 1000 feet of a school.
The passing of a law to the contrary establishing that the school may not, in fact, be gun free is in my mind sufficient - no other action needs to be taken. As I mentioned in the other post, most schools would have 0 guns, same as now… It’s a mental game, same as the publicized airmarshal program for flights or publicized states that allow CCW for citizens. Most folks don’t carry guns, but some do and no one knows who they are.
Folks with evil intent are quite odd, but not completely irrational; they’ll try to optimize their results per unit of effort like anyone else.
The point you make Wolfian is an extremely good one, the notion that “no one would care” I expect would be a good deterrent as well if the media agreed to stop publicizing such events. No future threat of punishment is sufficient since in these cases the laws are being broken quite readily already and in many cases the shooter offs themselves anyway.
Glee, the differences between the US and England were noted in the other thread already. One of them is a matter of scale, the other is culture (especially organized crime thanks to our prohibition days and War on Drugs).
I think this is self-evident, a rare event is more frequent in a larger population. Laying aside the cultural differences, the population difference between the two countries is a factor of 6 (50 mil / 300 mil). If a school shooting such as Columbine or this latest Amish debacle happens every two years here, we would expect it to occur every 12 there; all other things being equal and pretending people are like dice with regard to “snapping” on any particular day. (Yes, I know about the gambler’s fallacy; I’m illustrating a point here about normalizing statistics for population size).
There are, of course, many other factors - one of them under consideration in this thread being that in the US; the government has in my mind given a madman a reason to consider public schools as good places to go on a spree vs other public places equally full of people.
If it becomes known that teachers might be armed they will be the first casualty, unless these armed teachers spend the day looking at the door, or barricaded behind their desk and a few sand bags, . Upon entering a room the first thing the Bad Guy is going to do is shoot said teacher. If he gets to shoot just one kid before he does himself, or is offed by the Teacher Squad, there’s still one teacher and one kid too many going to their early graves.
