And anyone relying on a safety when they handle a loaded gun in a classroom is an irresponsible fool.
Call me naive, but I would have thought that an “administration of justice” class would be concerned with things like the structure of the court system, the legal rights of the individual, and so on. Apparently it actually means police combat training.
But setting that aside for the moment, if one is demonstrating how to disarm someone is it really necessary to use a real, live, shoots-bullets firearm as opposed to, say, a replica pistol or a banana?
I thought your question was totally fine, and made sense.
You effectively asked, how far civilization would need to fall for arming teachers to make sense.
That’s a totally valid question. There is a point where it’s fallen far enough to make sense.
You also correctly pointed out that a zombie apocalypse would probably be falling far enough that it makes sense. AND, I totally got that this point is clearly absurd. That we shouldn’t base actions today on the chance that we face a zombie apocalypse tomorrow.
I think we had some good natured discussion surrounding different options for how far civilization might fall, that isn’t zombie apocalypse but more “mundane” scenarios. All of which are also absurd scenarios that should never take place in a first world country.
Which was kind of the entire point we were all saying. Arming teachers only makes sense in absurd scenarios where all of society has collapsed. Which does seem to be what the proponents of the idea believe is going to happen.
Just now my facebook feed has a story from a friends daughter, currently locked down in her dorm room - because of a sniper reported on her college campus.
More guns is not going to solve this. Rust and Furnaces are going to solve this.
(update: no campus shooter. BUT, someone had called in the swat team on someone, falsely - somehow almost worse than a shooter)
But apparently, at least three people now take me for a gun apologist, and one of them after I clarified.
And they’ve started explaining to me that zombies don’t exist.
Which just shows that not all people are used to this kind of arguments.
There’s a difference between a hypothesis and a hypothetical argument, you know?
One goes “let’s assume there is a zombie attack”. The other goes “only if there’s a zombie attack would arming everyone in a school make sense”. Also, look up Reductio ad Absurdum.
More firearms in any scenario = more points of failure. It’s not even math, statistics or an engineering calculation, it’s simple arithmetic. If you find anyone that wants to quibble about it, they don’t give a crap about people, only their ‘Second Amendment rights’.
not really, since long before that point is reached schools themselves cease to make sense.
Edit2: this is kind of the core problem with the firearms “debate”. You’re hypothesising to try and figure out when the “solution” proposed by Drumpf and the NRA works, presupposing that the idea makes sense but it’s just that the required parameters haven’t been met yet. But the idea doesn’t make sense, at any point, because it’s just a fucking stupid idea through and through. You might as well propose hollowing out watermelons and wearing them as helmets to ward off the shooters bullets. In fact, that would be a better idea, since it doesn’t make the situation worse. Call it the watermelon test: if you cannot to show that what you’re proposing leads to better outcomes than wearing watermelon helmets, then you have to wear a watermelon helmet every work-hour of every work day for the next six months. And your idea gets pinned to the Stupid Idea wall of infamy.
Arming teachers only makes sense in absurd scenarios where all of society has collapsed.
Are school teachers in Syria armed? Somalia? South Sudan? All those places have seen society more-or-less collapse, but even so I’d hazard a guess that they still don’t think arming teachers is a good idea.
Edit: there’s a thought. Instead of hypothesizing zombies, how about looking for
a) examples of countries that DO routinely arm teachers, why they do that, what the controls are, and what the outcomes are (Israel springs to mind as a place that might do this?), and
b) countries in extreme states of distress, and whether or not they arm teachers (again, Syria, Somalia, South Sudan, the back blocks of Nigeria, etc),
Then look at whether conditions in the countries from a) or b) mirror the US in any meaningful way.
I found myself working at a funeral last year for a gun safety instructor who’d managed to shoot himself in the chest at the range. It’s frightening how often it happens.
If your post was meant to state the latter, I agree. Can you see why your post could have been seen as the former?
Well, thanks for the link, but I have heard the term. Reductio ad absurdum is as often, or more often, used to describe a rhetorical fallacy along the lines of “OMG, this is the first step towards confiscating all our guns!” See “slippery slope”, “thin edge of the wedge”, etc.
If you were playing devil’s advocate with your argument, fine.
Problem is that anybody making that distinction can only be arguing in bad faith to attempt to minimize the horrible thing that just happened. Sure, no one was killed but it’s not like Sandy Hook changed these people’s minds either, they don’t care when kids get killed but they care if this kid was directly or indirectly hurt? If it were true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” then it’s just as true that “Debris from the ricochet of a gun doesn’t make kids bleed, people make kids bleed”.
This reminds me of Schrodinger’s cat paradox. It was actually meant to be ridiculous yet people took it seriously.
If ever you expect 1 school shooter a day, it’s only a matter of time before you’re teaching to an empty classroom, either because kids will wise up and not go to school even as their parents protest that they don’t forget to pack their nine or because even successfully repelling an attack does not mean everybody survives every attack.
You know I feel the same as you. But the opposite side of our argument doesn’t think rationally and intelligently like we do. So. I will always caution us and hose that think like we do to be cautious and say what you mean and mean what you say.
No, there doesn’t, because the answer is never, basically. There’s no point at which the dynamics of arming teachers actually helps, even if you’re in a society under constant assault by school attackers (which indicates your society has already collapsed, effectively).
This is because:
Arming teachers is a response to mass school shootings (where a shooter is systematically moving through a school killing as many as possible). Even in the US, we only have one every couple years for the whole country. Regular school shootings happen all the time, but they’re quickly ended by the shooter himself or an unarmed bystander. (So having armed teachers won’t change those at all.) We know that having armed law enforcement on campus doesn’t deter mass shooters, so the purpose is not deterrence but to disable the shooter with violence. As pointed out, even trained LEOs hit less than 20% of the time, and in situations with bystanders, bystanders get hit frequently. Barely trained teachers (because that’s what they’ll be, at best) are going to be even more dangerous (to bystanders) in a firefight and less likely to take out the threat. Mass shooters prefer high-velocity semi-automatic rifles like the AR15; teachers would have handguns. You can potentially shoot someone several times with a 9mm handgun and they’re still standing. Get hit by a bullet from an AR15 and you’re likely to be blown to shit, regardless of where it hits you, given the kind of tissue damage it does. So in the event of a school assault, armed teachers are extremely unlikely to do any good - most likely they’ll end up adding to the death toll with stray bullets rather than taking down the shooter (and generally adding to the chaos - students won’t know where the shooter is, teachers will be mistaken for the shooter by responding law enforcement, etc.).
So we’re left with a situation where, if the unlikely event for which everyone has guns in the first place actually happens, armed teachers aren’t much use (or make the situation worse). Meanwhile, the rest of the time, they’re the threat, themselves - either through accidents, deliberate assaults (because let’s face it, teachers could potentially be the ones doing the shooting), or because a would-be shooter took their gun from them. (After all, to be effective against a mass shooter, the gun has to be at hand at all times, which means easily accessible to others as well. We’re literally providing the weapon for would-be shooters.)
If we look at schools in recent years that have armed LEOs or teachers, we have numerous incidents of guns being lost on campus, unarmed students being shot without provocation, etc. Multiply the guns (in more and more untrained hands, no less), you just multiply the problems.
I was curious about what percentage of handguns don’t have an external safety, couldn’t find an answer to it but it appears to be true as someone said above that to unload the gun one has to disengage the safety. Which strikes me as strange, wouldn’t you want a safety feature that would prevent the hammer or striker from detonating a bullet accidentally when unloading a gun? I don’t know, i don’t own guns so this is strange to me but if someone is knowledgeable on this feel free to jump in.
Note: The video in the article does not show the fatal moment. Do not look up the full video, but anyway your comment made me recall this story of a range instructor giving a girl and Uzi and instead of holding the gun with the girl he just gives it to her and terrible things happen.
Mantra: “apply the safety catch … remove the magazine … cock the weapon and engage the hold open recess … check inside the chamber for any rounds … release the working parts forward … release the safety catch … fire the action in a safe direction … apply the safety catch.”
I’m not going to say there aren’t some (very poorly designed) weapons where you do have to disengage the safety to remove the magazine. But I’ve not come across one. There are a reasonable number of pistols - and revolvers - that don’t have a safety, but that’s a different design decision.
Not saying this source is correct, but this is partly where i based my previous statement on.
Note that for many handguns which include a safety, the safety must be disengaged to even unload the gun. The slide can’t be pulled back to eject the loaded round without “turning off” the safety. That’s ok, because the safety isn’t there to keep the user from shooting the gun. Preventing that is the user’s job. The safety’s job is to keep the gun from going off if the user falls down and bangs the gun on a rock while it’s in the holster.
