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School Shootings: Do We Really Care?
Because, if we really care, there’s really only one response that has a chance of significantly limiting the violence in the short term. Everything else requires asking people to surrender rights — First, Second, and Fourth Amendment rights — that they will refuse to surrender.
There’s only one practical answer, and it doesn’t require that anyone surrender rights, nor that a large number of people be convinced to do something they don’t want to do, nor that some kind of miracle of mental health care occur. It requires that a relatively small number of people take responsibility for the safety of our school children.
It’s pretty simple: Encourage willing and competent school staff to be trained to carry weapons.
That will offend a lot of people. That’s okay. There are worse things than being offended.
Published in Guns
This from Sundance of The Conservative Tree House:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/19/school-shooting-was-outcome-of-broward-county-school-board-policy-now-local-and-national-politicians-weaponize-kids-for-ideological-intents/
I recall a local radio station making the point that back in the day there had been a terrible shooting in Kansas when the host was growing up and this ended up just being a local story. However now 24/7 media will look for the most glamorous picture of scum like this and run it constantly as if they were attempting “to get him laid.”
That is an interesting article. However, if the 2/14 shooter is not among the recipients of the PROMISE program, and the shift toward school discipline, rather than criminal adjudication, I don’t see how this article, or the PROMISE program specifically applies to the 2/14 shooting.
I’m not saying it is not an important point of investigation…just needs some connected dots.
The best way to make this happen is for gun dealers and training ranges to create opportunities for certified teachers to get the training.
An additional credential, like being Google certified. I wonder if those hours will count towards my continuing certification?
I’m reticent, but train8ng will fix that. Sign me up.
So, how do we make this happen?
And is this kind of thing something the NRA would support and organize?
We can melt down all the ‘Gun Free Zone’ signs and sell the aluminum for pistols.
It’s a very simple and reasonable solution. I taught at a small rural Texas high school for 16 years. Most of the time where were four or five veterans on staff; most (like me) already had a concealed carry permit. So it would be easy to come up with a small cadre already familiar with handguns and shooting.
It’s not hard to see that there could be countless schools where no one on staff is a veteran or has any prior experience in handling firearms, so the practical issues might be a little harder to solve. I think in Texas most schools would be like mine, but imagine schools in Massachusetts or Illinois or coastal California.
There would also probably be a need for some intensive training on the school environment in particular. When my airline pilot wife carried a handgun she had to attend a week long federal school strictly about carrying and shooting on the airplane. It was in fact almost all about defending the cockpit area. It used simulator training for shoot decisions. There would be a need for analogous training in schools. As simple as it sounds, the protocols would be complicated. If you are teaching at the end of a hallway and an active shooter is in the cafeteria at the other end of the hall, do you leave your class and advance on the shooter? Do you take up a position to defend one portion of your hallway? A week might not be enough.
An additional resource could be certified Parent volunteer “deputies” who could be trained and on campus and armed on a rotating schedule. Just the threat of their presence would decrease the likelihood of a mass shooting since it would not be a “gun free zone”.
I think there is more to it than just allowing ccw for staff, although I support that.
In my office we have key cards for access. Nobody comes in the office without either a key card or by signing in and being assigned a temporary ID. This is for security. It is standard practice, as far as my experience. Government offices, courthouses, and other such places all practice some similar level of security.
Yet our schools are wide open, unguarded and most don’t even have one armed guard on the property?
If our congressmen, their staff, and government employees deserve basic security in their workplace, our children deserve more.
The problem will never be solved by pretending we can erase guns from earth. The problem will only be solved by taking measures to secure our schools and to protect our children. And the only way to protect our children from a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. Oh, and to make it much harder for a bad person with a gun to walk in to our schools and move room to room shooting up the place.
That is what I consider ‘common sense’ action.
Let me add a bit after some reflection:
Even with armed staff, the tactical problems are pretty severe on most campuses. Multiple building are the biggest issue. At the campus where I taught, there are three separate buildings where class takes place; four if one county athletics and PE. Every class period a group of 20-40 students travels between the academic classroom building and the ag barn and building trades classrooms. The bandits and athletes practice outside most days. Even if the entire campus was surrounded with a security fence, a determined attacker could scale almost any fence to reach the outside portions of the campus.
We have an armed sheriff’s deputy on campus all day, but he can be at only one place.
This is a small school – grade 9-12 enrollment has never been over 350 students. I can’t imagine the difficulty in securing one of those mega schools with 4 or 5 thousands kids.
I’m on the school board now and we have been working on plans to make the campuses more physically secure; we have partnered with the sheriff and emergency services for a system that will allow badged personnel access during lockdowns, but the cost is intimidating. We have a good fund balance but will likely need a bond to do everything we want. It’s just not easy, but we have to find a way.
Thanks for the thoughts. There is a danger, as they say, of making the better the enemy of the good: there is no perfect solution, and we don’t even need the best possible solution. Allowing qualified staff to be armed immediately improves the prospects for students in a shooting situation, and that’s a sensible place to start.
I think a lot of people consider this somehow exotic or extraordinary. It isn’t. Lots of people carry guns every day, and they do it not as part of a coordinated or overly analyzed public safety effort. They simply do it to be able to defend themselves and others should the need arise.
This can be like that.
Absolutely. Every armed defender makes the problem that much more difficult for a shooter. And all we have to do is keep making the target harder until bad actors decide it’s not worth it.
Yes.
And, unlike in the case of terrorism, where we can assume the perpetrator will simply choose another “soft target,” and so we’re forever engaged in crime displacement, the peculiar pathology of school shooters suggests (to me at least) that this might be a kind of violence that doesn’t simply relocate to another venue in most cases. The act seems to be associated with the school environment itself.
It’s strange that it’s not just the politicians who don’t seem to want to face this reality, but even many of the students themselves. If I were in high school and were afraid to go to school, gun control might be somewhere on my list of priorities, but it wouldn’t be at the top. I have to go to school TOMORROW. The schools need to be defended now.
But all the students at the rallies seem to be pushing only gun control. Even with the threat of a school shooting looming over them, they still only seem interested in half measures.
Henry, How right you are!
Israel, whom I believe has a somewhat serious terrorist problem, has reduced it’s school shootings to zero, has implemented similar policies ( arming school staff) and has implemented metal detectors at the entrances to prevent anyone with a knife or a gun from entering the school.
Do we really care? That depends on what the meaning of “we” is.
Rush found this from 2000; a Cokie and Sam interview with Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive VP:
It seems more efficient to arm schools than disarm millions of law abiding individuals. It appears that politicians hire security for themselves probably would continue to do so if gun control/2nd amendment repeal happened. They wouldn’t bet their own lives on their own legislation being the ticket to elimination of guns used for crimes.
I agree with the suggested measures. I’d also like to see the media exercise some self-control (pigs flying first?). I would like very much not to know anything about the shooter. This one or any of the previous ones or the inevitable follow-ons. No names, no photos. If the shooters were strictly referred to by age, sex, and pathology and denigrated, we might see fewer of these creeps act on their delusions of grandeur as “famously evil monster geniuses.” How about 19-year-old, male, school expellee, loser. That’s all. Sure, the name would eventually get out, but the media don’t have to report it to the point where everyone knows it. And all photos should have his face pixellated or smudged out. He should be the non-entity he really is inside. And then send him to jail to rot, never to see the light of day. No media interviews, no visitors, no book contracts.
I just had lunch with another school board member and we plan to have arming school staff members on the next meeting agenda.
Wonderful! G-d bless Texas!
OTLC, I’ll never lend credence to any claim that anyone in government actually wants violence, or doesn’t care about school shootings. It’s just the kind of claim that polarizes and makes people sound crazy. Let’s assume good intent all around and work with that. (Even if we’re wrong, it’s still the best assumption, in my opinion.)
Thanks. Israel does a lot of very sensible things.
They’re kids. Kids are unwise. They say foolish things, particularly when swept up in drama. Love them to pieces, but they have little to contribute and should be politely ignored.
I agree with having armed staff in public institutions, but consider the following scenarios:
There is no tactic/outcome that will convert those who pursue gun control, because gun control is not advocated to solve that problem. You can tell because (like most leftist nostrums) the answer is always the same, no matter what the issue.
As I’m looking around the Internet news sites I visit most days, I’m seeing a full-out assault on the right to own a gun. One news site put the word right in quotation marks.
Conservatives need to gather as many stories as they can find of every life saved by a private gun owner.
I imagine public opinion tracks with the Left-Right political divide. But we need to hold onto the fact that there is a group in between those two sides who are still persuadable if we do a good job of it. It’s the group that has been swinging the close presidential elections to one side or the other in the last twenty years. We need to keep working on protecting this right.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the venue switched to malls or movie theaters if schools were made sufficiently hard targets. The more recent shooters seem to lack specific targets so any generalized group of happy teenagers might do.
I would be surprised but, again, there are so few instances that we’ll probably never know. However, the same approach — more armed citizens — works there as well.
I don’t think we can assume good intent, or at the very least we have to admit that there is a welcoming relish involved among some with each instance of school shootings or cop shooting a black, otherwise the usual suspects might actually suggest something beyond gun control and federalizing racist police forces. Either that or they simply lack seriousness, but never getting off their narratives shows discipline and seriousness.
To what end? I mean, what do we gain by saying that, even if it’s true? I don’t see how it changes the approach we take to public education (about guns) and advocacy.
This is a different and larger topic, but I think persuading people involves building bridges, and part of that process is crediting the opposition with good intent — even if we might doubt it in some cases. I don’t want to talk to anti-gun people who accuse the pro-gun side of bad intent, and they won’t want to talk to me if I suggest that about them.
Students say what they have been instructed to say. I’d prefer to leave decisions to actual adults with a high school education.
The public accepts that thousands of people die each year in automobile accidents because almost every member of the public can see the benefits that come with having rapid personal transportation. When I bring up with my pro-gun control friends that firearms prevent crime, they react in ways that tell me they have never even considered the possibility, let alone heard of any instances in which a person other than a police officer used a firearm (even if just to indicate its presence) to stop a crime.
Especially when the “offense” being taken is aesthetic, and there are kids’ lives at stake.
If Sundance is right about this, it may come out in discovery:
This is what he means:
BTW, his Trayvon Martin analyses were excellent.