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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
Let me stop you right there, Mr. Tax and Spend Librul! How do we know this isn’t another bridge to nowhere, a complete waste of the people’s hard-earned money…oh. It’s a metaphorical bridge.
Well, it probably still going to cost too much.
If you have to ask, Mr. (or Mrs.) Acronym-for-a-Name, then you can’t afford whatever bridge I’m selling. (But send whatever you’ve got, and we’ll see how far it goes.)
I’ll use this reply again to show what the left coast thinks;
Our Cal governor Brown just signed a bill making it illegal for anyone to have a gun on school property. It seems that four school districts were going to allow there teachers with CC to bring guns. Our teachers union and lefty law makers would have none of that. To allow some to be armed seems to be the only practical solution, however this law lets the shooters have 15/20 min.in a gun free zone before police arrive.
I think all teachers should have a basic course in firearms and those who feel they would be comfortable with getting a CCW do so. Hopefully several teachers per school would, allowing a rotation so that an outsider would not know who carries. These courses should be part of the continuing education teachers take to get into higher pay scales. Of course these classes should be geared toward their particular needs.
They could get hazard pay like military people in war zones.
I agree 100%. I volunteer for such duty at my school, and will accept the responsibility to place myself in harm’s way to protect students, being appropriately armed.
Bleah on Gov. Brown.
Borrowing a quote from a post by @bossmongo ,
This fact strongly suggests that suggests that fairly minimal defensive responses would have an outsized impact in minimizing the death toll. A rapid response from someone with a weapon would save a lot of lives that will otherwise be lost waiting for someone to bring a weapon from off campus.
It has long been the case in California’s public schools that some students and teachers just have to take one for the social justice narrative. Brown is making it clear that some will be expected to make the supreme sacrifice.
I agree that far greater security is needed. That should come first. You seem to think that it is first and last. Maybe.
I further agree that emphasis on mental health would be a diversion from real school safety. My guess is that Cruz was no stranger to guidance counselors and school psychologists is his troubled academic career. Didn’t quite work out, wouldn’t you say? Pouring money into providing more mental health professionals would be nothing more than a jobs program. Not bad if you’re in the headshrinking business, but a total waste of taxpayer money. I’m spending time on this mental health business because I fear Trump will promote it. It sounds good on the surface, and likely would get wide political support. Apple pie for the gullible who want a quick fix.
Cruz is a special case in my estimation. He probably belongs in the same category as the handful of school shooters. He is not the gangster often produced in public schools. Neither is he a terrorist, nor the Las Vegas killer. I think the church massacre guy is a different profile as well. Some have suggested that a focus is needed to get to the bottom of what makes the Cruzes tick. Of course this will require money for long term research. Another bureaucracy. Just what we need. Hardening the fortress with specially trained security personnel would be far cheaper. And quicker.
The school shooters are mass murderers. Monsters! You can research to death the causes that led them to kill. And it’s not as if volumes have not already been written analyzing causation. But in the end you need sane measures to protect against them.
I haven’t gone into background checks that I believe need to be beefed up. And I recognize the civil liberties that entails. On the other hand, I can’t get too worked up about protecting the rights of those who are KNOWN dangers in the community.
No, not last. First, because it’s the only thing that can plausibly work quickly to stop the 0.0005% of high school students likely to become school shooters. But not last.
I just had a thought; screw the teachers. Arm the janitors.
They’re the ones who have all the keys, who actually know the layout of the whole school, who can keep track of several rifles and can coordinate with other janitors/admin.
Also the front office secretaries.
Disarming millions of law abiding citizens is the point of gun control. The Left cannot achieve their socialist utopia until the people cannot defend themselves. That is why they never want to accept any solution except gun control.
I doubt that politicians pay for their own security details. I’ll bet that taxpayers pick up that tab.
We’re learning more about the decisions that led to the shooting. A new Miami Herald article states that the killer was never expelled from school, due to his legal right to an education. The article asks “could the schools have done more?”
The answer so far: probably, but for reasons of social justice they decided not to.
Here’s what The Conservative Treehouse learned in the aftermath of another high profile case with a Broward County student:
If the Parkland murderer had had a criminal record, he would not have been allowed to buy his guns. Jack Cashill recently noted (though he mistakenly accepted reports that the killer had been expelled when as noted above that the district does not expel; the killer had been suspended) that the killer’s Hispanic surname, the result of his being adopted as a baby by the couple whose name he bears, put him in the class of students the school district didn’t want arrested—in service of what Cashill calls “Obama’s misbegotten quest to achieve racially statistical ‘equity’ for youthful offenders by not arresting them for very real crimes.”
It is highly likely that the dead and wounded in Parkland are the casualties of the social justice war—and that the protesting students are on the side that will produce yet more casualties.
That CTH article makes the below quote on the home page for sheriff Scott j Israel, much more interesting. Scott Israel is the sheriff who appeared on the CNN town hall.
The new New York Times article about the transcript of the call to the fbi about the shooter using money from his mother’s debit card to buy weapons.
Then the new articles about not one but 4 LE agents standing by and not entering the building.
hopefully the new evidence will dissipate some of these emotional reactions.
“Our success will be measured by the number of kids we keep out of jail, not the number we put in jail.”
~ Sheriff Scott J. Israel
https://www.flsheriffs.org/sheriffs/bio/broward-county
For reasons that include – but are not limited to – racism, it is easier to catch minority criminals.
For reasons that include – but are not limited to – racism, it is easier to successfully prosecute minority criminals.
There are numerous ways to react to this. The very worst one is to stop arresting and prosecuting minority criminals.
Well, I guess I’ll be the first to say it. I don’t care. If a school shooting were to occur in my community, then yes I would. It would devestate my community, and I would know many of the people affected.
I think that school shootings should be treated as a local matter. They should also be covered locally only, at least as front page news. I don’t even think the FBI should be involved. The Broward County Sheriff’s department botched this, but they could have handled all of this on their own. They were warned by their residents. The shooter was a resident. All of this is local to that community. And the community should hold their sheriff responsible.
The number of victims of school shootings are still small, and the incidents are random. There is no solution to this problem, though there may be one way to mitigate them.
These shootings are recurring so frequently in large part because of the national, and international coverage, providing a feedback loop for other kids to have a try at it. There’s a proposal out to have the press withhold the names of the shooter when these incidents occur. Given they do this for rape victims, couldn’t they restrain themselves with school shootings as well?
I’ve never owned a gun, though through my time in the military, I have practiced with small arms. They have never excited me. Nevertheless I’m a big supporter of gun rights. And given that more restrictions will not solve this problem, I resent that school shootings are used as an excuse to limit these rights.
I also resent that these kids have been given a stage, and especially given a national stage. I doubt the attention is good for them. They have a lot to work out. Crying in public, in front of a camera is no way to recover from this.