technically the teacher did not shoot the student as it was stated in the article…it was debris that hit and injured the student.
Yes the entire thing is preposterous, but please stay on point with the facts. Deviating at any point gives the opposite viewpoint ammunition (pun not intended).
Whoops. Big slaughter will cite this as the reason for the incident, stating it was the teachers fault and not the gun.
Well, aside from fake news, crisis actors, etc.
I was going to ask if he knew how the safety works, but considering he doesn’t know how to check if it’s loaded, I’m guessing he didn’t. Not to mention why he even thought it was necessary to pull it out.
IANAL but I think it is the case that if I fire a gun and you are struck by fragments of my projectile I can be held legally responsible for that incident. The fact that the student was not struck by an intact bullet is, in some ways, immaterial. Of course, to the student in question, it is VERY material, but that is a different issue. As we teach hunters here, you are responsible for the bullet and any damage done until it comes to rest. The fact that this student’s neck was in the path of bits of this projectile would mean that the teacher is, in fact, responsible for the injury. If you prefer to refer to it as “injury caused by impact from a projectile fired irresponsibly from a firearm” instead of “shot” I guess that is ok. Seems like a lot of words, though.
One story I read suggested he was attempting to verify that the gun was unloaded when he accidentally fired it through the ceiling.
Which is just one of many reasons why you shouldn’t play with your guns in a school.
I don’t care what they say. If anything becomes lodged in my neck, it’s serious.
Actually, do you happen to know the statistics of when arming teachers would be the responsible thing to do?
I mean, there’s sure to be a point where it makes sense.
I mean, as a scoutmaster, I have been handing axes to 11-year-olds, and if I was a teacher and I expected about one school shooter a day, I’d rather teach to a roomful of armed 14-year-olds as per @anon76551318’s suggestion.
Maybe doing the statistics and actually knowing the numbers might be useful in future discussions.
It’s barely even statistics, practically just basic algebra.
If there’s 1 gun accident for every X gun interactions. Increasing the number of gun interactions will obviously increase the number of gun accidents.
The NRA or whomever else can argue all they want over the value of X. If it’s 1 in 1,000, 1 in 10,000, 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 1,000,000. If the CDC was able to do actual investigation, we would probably have a good value for X. But, it’s actual value doesn’t really matter.
So, a school with say 49 teachers/administrator and 1 armed officer. Arm 9 teachers, and there will be 9 times more gun interactions. Assume the current officer has 1 gun interaction a day, 180 for the year. If the teachers are the same, now we have 1,800 interactions for the year. If the accident rate is 1 in 1,000, the original 180 yearly interactions were probably all safe. But, now, we’re almost guaranteed to have at least 1 and maybe 2 accidents with 1,800 interactions. The thing is, the actual accident rate doesn’t matter at all. At scale, the 10 plus fold increase in interactions will cause 10 times the number of accidents. And, arming more teachers just speeds it up.
People keep saying that arming teachers with guns makes schools like prisons. That is not true. The guards that have guns are only on the perimeters, the outsides of prisons. There are not supposed to be any guns inside prisons, among the population. Arming teachers actually makes students MORE likely to get shot* than prison inmates are.
*although assaults are still common in prisons. And without guns, prison is a very unequal world, where raw strength and a propensity for violence mean that some people are able to abuse other with little check.
Ouch. You’re right. They’ll say, “This guy wasn’t responsibly trained… We’re talking about only giving responsible people guns.” Goalposts moved.
The NRA would never admit to defeat unless reasonable gun-control and education were to be enforced. Then they would assume a victim status and ask for money to control their fiscal bleeding
But if the surrounding country is heavily armed and school shooters do exist, you’d need to balance that against the number of school shooters who are stopped by armed teachers or even armed students.
I suspect that this will only balance at a ridiculously low value of X or a ridiculously high number of school shooters. But I’d like to know.
After all, in a zombie apocalypse, it probably does make sense to give guns to responsible 10-year-olds.
It’s possible that the gun going off was unintentional but why wasn’t the safety engaged? The levels of fail here are like an onion.
It’s too bad the US government has suppressed the research that would be necessary for us to have an informed discussion about the statistics. All the data that currently exists is collected in an inadequate ad-hoc manner and surely has many holes. All that’s left to us is to do the best we can.
To your point, do you really think there is a point where arming teachers is the right thing to do? What variable are you varying?
-Likelihood of a teacher being in such a scenario? That’s not enough based on our data on the accuracy of shooters in stressful situations.
-Likelihood of teacher being in a scenario but not having to shoot? Is deterrence enough to outweigh the inevitable accidents?
-Likelihood of being in a scenario and being an expert marksman in live-fire situations?
How many teacher-struck casualties are too many?
Is it okay as long as the teachers kill fewer than the shooter?
What if the teacher kills a student while missing the shooter but the shooter is apprehended? Who is at fault for the student murdered by the teacher?
I think that even if you thought there was going to be 1 shooter per school per day (WTF), there are better ways to deal with that than arming the students or teachers (such as controlling entrance into the school).
In a zombie apocalypse I think you could give guns to even the irresponsible 10 year olds!
I’m just cranking the incidence of school shooters to a ridiculous maximum. Just a matter of balancing the risks.
If the teacher is twice as likely to shoot the shooter than he is to shoot a student, and he otherwise shoots one student per month, then things should balance out when there would be a little more than one school shooting victim per month. Zombie apocalypse levels.
No, because all the other kids they shoot might turn into zombies as well.
What struck the student – bullet fragments, or non-bullet debris? The article has conflicting statements:
Seaside Police Chief Abdul Pridgen told the Monterey County Weekly that a male student was “struck in the neck by ‘debris or fragmentation’ from something overhead.” Pridgen said whatever hit the student was not a bullet.
However, the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told KSBW 8 that it was his understanding that fragments from the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and lodged in the boy’s neck.
… Gonzales said he learned about the incident when his 17-year-old son came home with blood on his shirt and bullet fragments in his neck.
I misread that in the article. I thought it was debris from the ceiling that hit the student, not fragments from the bullet itself.
So it would still not classify as “teacher shot student” but the teacher is ofc responsible for injuring the student to be sure.
My comment was merely on being exact with words on this subject so as to not allow any wiggle room for the NRA-fetishists.
A ridiculously high value of X. A value so high that increasing the number of gun interactions by 10 fold (or more) doesn’t move us any meaningful way closer to that value. While we don’t know the actual value of X, we know it’s not that high. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any accidents already.
For instance, 1 in P interactions with a pencil end with an accident killing someone. The number P is so high that we can give every kid in school dozens of pencils to start the year and we haven’t changed the chances of someone dying in any meaningful way.
A zombie apocalypse, or really just the fall of civilization would both increase the number of school shootings or the general danger level of being in a school. I agree that this would probably increase the risk enough that it’s a bigger risk than the increase in accidents.
Marauding bands of gangs with no law or government, everyone living only for themselves with no community. Same outcome as the zombie apocalypse.
One of the advantages of living in a first world county is supposed to be that we don’t have to worry about that level of lawlessness. Even if it does feel like an NRA talking point that we are practically there already.
I am reminded of this video from ages ago where an officer was at an event with parents and kids and was talking about gun safety… and shoots himself in the leg.
