I am a second amendment person but this is freaking nuts. There is no good reason to have armed security guards with rifles on a school campus ever. Here in Alameda County CA we have a swat team they get serious weapons like this. They must pass serious physical challenges before being allowed to apply for the job and go through lots and lots of training and on going training. Since the district is spending 12 grand on rifles and not a half mill on training. They are handing these guns to UNTRAINED SECURITY GUARDS, who are watching over children. There is no positive outcome for this.
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This is the same Douglas County that spend less than the national average per child on educationâŚ
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools-have-a-money-problem
(Scroll down to the map and search for Douglas County CO)
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Itâs hard to see but Iâm putting the image of a very tiny violin just after the period of this sentence, and you may hear it playing if you listen closely enough.
FTFY
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The guards already have pistols. (Guards are LEOâs)
If youâre really worried about danger⌠the pistols are way more âdangerousâ than rifles.
Pretty amazing that they have an armed LEO at every school. Dunno.
Fear not, the article which you didnât read never uses the term âassault rifle,â just the BB headline. But since your comment has made an obvious error, makes me wonder what else in your comment history is false.
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Honestly most forms of violence in the U.S. have been dropping for a long time now. We can and should do better, but weâre not far off the rest of the developed world in terms of violent crime. The only areas where we really stand out are
- Number of gun deaths
- Number of people killed by police (lots of overlap with item #1 there)
- Number of people in prison (these are the lucky ones who evaded item #2)
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To be fair, while the US certainly doesnât have a monopoly on those social issues, they are world leaders in them. In addition to overly accessible guns of course. They really need to clamp down on both.
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I think that the case that an armed SRO would ever prevent any deaths is a very tenuous one (akin to how many deaths are prevented by taking off shoes at an airport), but the case that eventually human error will cause injury in a school even with well-trained SROâs is inevitable with enough time (taking off shoes at an airport doesnât kill anyone).
When weâre talking about lives, I think it has to do with morality. How many lives is this school district willing to spend on unnecessary security theater? If itâs any, that seems deeply immoral to me. The people who freaked out over Ebola didnât risk lives by winding themselves up.
Itâs a trade-off. The benefits of kids playing generally outweighs the risks. The benefits of giving assault rifles to school guards are basically nonexistent, and the risks are very real (hundreds of accidental gun deaths every year, and unless you want to âno true scotsmanâ it, some of these are from presumably responsible gun owners).
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I, too did the JROTC high school shooting thing. Sure we had guns at school, but this was late 70âs and at that time guns were for war, hunting, or shooting maybe one person that you really disliked. We had yet to have to come to terms with the idea of a spree. Might have happened by then, but we didnât really think about it.
Technology and culture changes, and we have to adapt our responses going forward, hopefully not instigating a literal arms race in the process.
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Glory glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a rulah
Hid behind the door with a loaded 44
Now she ainât my teacher no more
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I use /feed when possible but on mobile Chrome have to use /category/post, which seems to track fairly close (but not perfectly) to the RSS feed.
If guards only have regular handguns, the maximum rate at which students could get shot just isnât fast enough.
It was a tie-in to the new Blu Ray release of Red Dawn.
Which coincidentally takes place in Colorado.
Could well be cheaper than new sod and lawn maintenance and treatment of fire ant attacks.
Yeah, since the last redesign, some posts seem to disappear off the front page almost immediately, for some reason. Since I usually check the site pretty frequently, I donât usually look at the second page very often, but every so often I do and find new articles nestled in between two articles that I had seen.
Yeah, the order of results seems a bit wonky there, too. Seems like a mysterious algorithm determines what posts are at the top and randomly hides some further back in the listâŚ
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WTF America, just WTF?!?
There are plenty of school cops with guns. If what you were saying is true there would already be plenty of shootings of students by these school cops.
There arenât.
Lol - LEO donât get that much more training.
Am pretty sure Alameda Sheriffâs Dept. and most agencies in the SF bay area these days issue âpatrol riflesâ to nearly all squad cars, not limited to SWAT or special teams/units.
For those that scoff at a 20 hr class. In Alameda county you can get certified as an instructor in 40 hrs! 
https://www.sheriffacademy.com/class.php?id=44
@Daedalus You are thinking wrong. There are many cases where shooters when confronted by someone armed with a firearm, simply give up or are readily subdued when they otherwise may not have been.
But the best synopsis is this FBI report, which I am surprised (or not) that I havenât run across before which looks like it was prepared by the FBI with Texas State University.
Resolutions
The majority of the 160 incidents (90 [56.3%]) ended on the shooterâs initiativeâ
sometimes when the shooter committed suicide or stopped shooting, and other times when
the shooter fled the scene.
There were at least 25 incidents where the shooter fled the scene before police arrived. In 4
additional incidents, at least 5 shooters fled the scene and were still at large at the time the
study results were released.
In other incidents, it was a combination of actions by citizens and/or law enforcement that
ended the shootings. In at least 65 (40.6%) of the 160 incidents, citizen engagement or the
shooter committing suicide ended the shooting at the scene before law enforcement arrived.
Of those:
â In 37 incidents (23.1%), the shooter committed suicide at the scene before police
arrived.
â In 21 incidents (13.1%), the situation ended after unarmed citizens safely and successfully
restrained the shooter. In 2 of those incidents,24 3 off-duty law enforcement
officers were present and assisted.
â Of note, 11 of the incidents involved unarmed principals, teachers, other school
staff and students who confronted shooters to end the threat (9 of those shooters
were students).
â In 5 incidents (3.1%), the shooting ended after armed individuals who were not law
enforcement personnel exchanged gunfire with the shooters. In these incidents, 3 shooters
were killed, 1 was wounded, and 1 committed suicide.
â The individuals involved in these shootings included a citizen with a valid firearms
permit and armed security guards at a church, an airline counter, a federally
managed museum, and a school board meeting.25
â In 2 incidents (1.3%), 2 armed, off-duty police officers engaged the shooters, resulting
in the death of the shooters. In 1 of those incidents, the off-duty officer assisted a
responding officer to end the threat.26
Even when law enforcement arrived quickly, many times the shooter still chose to end his
life. In 17 (10.6%) of the 160 incidents, the shooter committed suicide at the scene after law
enforcement arrived but before officers could act.
In 45 (28.1%) of the 160 incidents, law enforcement and the shooter exchanged gunfire. Of
those 45 incidents, the shooter was killed at the scene in 21, killed at another location in 4,
wounded in 9, committed suicide in 9, and surrendered in 2.
Actually its a fairly insignificant number involving someone with a firearm who was neither a cop or security guard (according to your own link it is 1 out of 160, 0.6%). In fact conceal and carry permits have had little to no positive effect on crime rates.
Defensive gun use also must be discounted as a general factor
â36 to 64 percent of the defensive gun uses reported in the survey were likely illegalâmeaning the firearm was used to intimidate or harm another person rather than for legitimate self-defense.â
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Here is a sample to the contrary:
http://news.abs-cbn.com/nation/regions/11/28/14/student-accidentally-shot-security-guard
http://www.guns.com/2013/05/15/student-accidently-shot-by-armed-security-guard/
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/Southwest/10/31/tulsa.shooting/index.html?_s=PM:US
I can go on from here.
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