The only thing that’ll happen if you arm teachers, is that the next time this happens (Thursday week, or whenever y’all are due) teachers will deliberately be shot first. I don’t value their lives any less than their students’, no matter how much of a dick my Calculus teacher was.
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Pretty much destroys the “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” argument the NRA keeps chanting, now, doesn’t it.
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Not to mention publicly shamed for failing to stop the attack.
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I agree. It pretty much GUARANTEES that student homicide-by-teacher rates skyrocket across the nation. Those little bastards can be damn annoying - amiright?
The real answer: less guns in general, NO types of certain guns (like AR15s), restrict access to the pool of guns that remain, and better supports for those who would consider killing innocent children to prevent this kind of thing happening…
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When reality refuses to support their mantra they just shift to “I wasn’t talking about the ACTUAL good guys with guns, obviously they didn’t work out. I mean the hypothetical good guys with guns who would have prevented this in my fantasy scenario.” (See @law’s comments above.)
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Not to mention even trained police officers are far more likely to miss their targets. (I’ve read studies citing from 18-36% of shots hitting their intended targets. And these are people who have to get continually recertified in marksmanship.)
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I wonder, if there were more guns in the schools, how many kids that wouldn’t otherwise ever get access to guns would manage to lift them from the teachers. When I was in middle school we stole a teacher’s toupee right off his head, no lie.
Thank you for that. Gives me some hope for my country.
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Oh you mean like military bases?
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Isn’t the first rule of most conflict situations to deescalate the situation. To lower the risk.
If the situation is “mass shootings”, arming every other person and turning the entire countryside into a permanent war zone feels like the exact opposite. A never ending escalation of risk for everyone involved.
I’m not sure why anyone thinks that’s the best direction to move.
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Because America will always do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else.
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When we find out that several of these guys were football coaches or played football will we change that to: “this wouldn’t have happened if they were Home ec teachers”?
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One of the problems here is that if he had gone in, guns blazing, is that he probably would have killed some random kids in the crossfire. (Assuming he even made it that far before being cut down, running into a situation where he had no idea what was going on.)
But still this just shows the total emptiness of the Republican/NRA “solution” to shootings - the “good guy with a gun” narrative and “mass shooters target ‘gun-free’ zones.” Both are bullshit for the same reason - schools, which already had cops on campus (Columbine), added more cops. So schools, like many other targets of gunmen in mass shootings, have not been “gun-free zones.” That didn’t stop anyone. (Given how often gunmen kill themselves or seek death-by-cop, that’s clearly not going to be a deterrent anyways.) All those “good guys with guns” also failed to stop shooters. Every. Single. Time. We’ve got a couple instances where, after a mass shooting, someone with a gun engaged the gunman and… forced them to leave (which they were doing anyways), so… victory? (We also have a few instances of the cops showing up and shooting bystanders with guns after the event.)
But the NRapublicans keep hammering at the “good guys with guns” and “gun-free zones” narratives, because that’s all they’ve got, and I guess they figure if they shout it enough, they’ll drown out people pointing out reality doesn’t support them.
All the veterans and cops (and veterans and cops -turned teachers) talking about this think it’s a crap idea, too. I’m reading stuff by Olympic-level target shooters (who are also veterans) who call the idea a non-starter. Which is to say, anyone with real gun experience knows this is idiotic. The only people who think it’s a good idea are delusional Hollywood-action-movie-fantasist gun-fondlers who don’t know what they fuck they’re talking about. It appears there’s no getting through to them.
And, oooh, schools with armed, trained law enforcement on them.
Seems like we’re stuck in a loop trying the same wrong thing over and over again, though.
This wouldn’t have happened if they were wizards.
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There are a lot of ways that could (and inevitably would) go down.
It needn’t even be a malicious teen looking to cause trouble. It could be a curious Kindergartener who reaches for their teacher’s sidearm while said teacher is distracted with the task of actually teaching children instead of maintaining constant vigilance.
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Having experienced what the nuns can do without firearms- I shudder to think what we would be consigning these poor kids to.
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Yup and it’s always easy and fun to armchair quarterback when you weren’t there.
It’s easy to say how this guy was cowardly and how if you were there you totally would have punched the wounded so hard they were healed right after making the shooter surrender with nothing more than your Blue Steel gaze.
This guy was no hero, but I don’t think many of us would have fared much better if we were in that same situation.
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The gun nuts aren’t just angry at the cops because they let down those kids. They’re angry at the cops because they let down the “good guy with a gun” narrative.
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So…you think that teachers with guns will succeed where trained officers failed?
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I think you do yourself, and many others, a disservice. It seems to me that there are always people who try to get others out without regard for their own safety, and always people who try to deal with the threat directly, as best they can.
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Do you want extra credit, punk? Do ya?
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The weird thing is that military bases are generally, and super weirdly, fairly “gun -free” zones.
I’m not military, but a few of the guys I hang out with are, and when I asked how Ft. Hood etc… can possibly happen the answer is always “Man, they’re super strict about ammo on base”. People may have weapons that they’re responsible for, but the average soldier has no ammo (It’s apparently all in the armory).
Not what I would have thought either.
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