So the NRA's response to Sandy Hook is...

All the while I was listening to LaPierre, I knew exactly what the liberal response would be, and I'm not disappointed.

Even if he'd had truly brilliant suggestions, everything he said would be discounted as coming from The NRA.

Yeah, there's no bias there, Mike.

One security guard and a locked door is an "armed enclave".
And you apparently have more info than anybody else on what kind of personnel would be hired

Once again, we get nowhere using pejorative sound bites.

Speaking of bias...

Public schools around the country are broke. You don't think they're going to spend as little money as possible on the security guard and locked door?

Or are you willing to have your taxes go up to pay for them?

Yeah he'd have to be a real Nostradamus to see that far into the future.

Oh, wait...

I know this makes for less fun being an internet genius, but it's a local issue. Ya know stuff like raising a local bond, voting for county sheriff and school board members. People have no problem raising funds for a new gymnasium, same goes for this. It has nothing to do with federal taxes, gun control, or the NRA.

It'll be interesting - in a Schadenfreude kind of way - to observe the overlap between creationism, curtailed textbook budgets, and Schools as Armed Camps.

According to today's republican party there's nothing wrong with this country that more guns and fewer taxes won't fix. Hey if we need to raise taxes for security guards how would Grover Norquist feel about that?

I'm honestly surprised to hear that video game argument coming out of the NRA, of all groups. Crazies have found ways to kill people well before the advent of modern technology.

Actormike has a point. The nation kneejerked after 9/11 and we ended up with the TSA.

And I remember a lot of schools came up with BS "Safety" measures following Columbine which included the ban of trenchcoats ( ), zero [-]thinking[/-] tolerance rules, and even one school mandating clear backpacks....which I"m sure all the pre-teen females carrying tampons and pads must have really loved.

Or you may need to think and/or state your case more clearly.

Because it can't be stopped completely, let's stop talking as though there is some mandate and/or edict that can stop it completely. And what would you classify people who commit violent crimes as, if not criminals?

My point was clear. 'flow's approach to That Which I Do Not Want to Hear differs from yours.

Please do.

Tamar didn't say "commit violent crimes"; she said "acts out violently." Not mutually inclusive.

I'd ask the question "Is there any program you care less about than school safety?" If the answer is "Yes," I'd say "Cut that." If the answer is "No," then forget about it.

So the backlash against the NRA's suggestion of stationing an armed police officer at every school would be funny if it wasn't so sad. The same people who think that no one needs a gun because we should just call the cops are now adding the caveat that relying on the cops is only a good option if the cops are too far away to do anything but bag bodies. Idiots.

Thoughts:

How many schools are there in America, and what's the starting salary for a police officer?

Will one officer really be enough? What about school activities scheduled outside regular class hours, or days when the officer is sick or on vacation? What's to stop a shooter from attacking one side of a school while the officer is on the other side?

Why does the NRA object to any sort of restrictions on guns, but appear to support restrictions on gun-related speech like movies or video games? If simply depicting a gun on television is so dangerous that it apparently shouldn't be protected by the Constitution, why is carrying an actual gun not subject to the same considerations?

If you place police officers in every school, how long before they start treating the students like criminals?

Roughly 100,000 schools, and who wants a mere starting officer for the job? And, of course, a single armed guard is just a first target, so you need at least two, more in larger schools. In all, it's at least $10-15 billion/yr in tax increases that LaPierre is proposing to do a very poor job of solving a very rare problem. Seems mightily inefficient.

So you're okay with your taxes going up to pay for the hundreds of thousands of extra armed government employees you're advocating for hiring?

This should be good.

The estimate I heard was that when you factor in things like benefits, salary, health insurance, etc., it would cost a school $80K/yer per officer. No idea how accurate that is.

Well, maybe the plan is to repurpose a bloated U.S. military as school security. If we reassigned a third of the active duty personnel in each branch to school security then we'd cut back on adventurism abroad and have trained killers guarding all our schools without a tax hike. Win/win!

Two officers per school, that's 16 billion. And there are schools that probably would need far more officers. My high school had 2,400 kids spread out between two buildings. You think two guys can cover all that?

Not to mention equipment, training, guns, ammo, cars, uniforms and pensions. It could easily be 35-40 billion when all is said and done. From cash-strapped local school districts in a bad economy.

Wallets out, everyone!

Amazing how the 2nd Amendment has priority over everything. Amazing.

Amazing how children's safety is a priority until someone suggests something that would actually improve children's safety--instead of a kneejerk reaction that would actually reduce everyone's safety and take away a fundamental human right.

Great, so how much of a tax increase can we put you down as supporting?

Here's another vote from the party of "Smaller Gubmint/Not with MY Taxes...except when it comes to guns."

Listen, the genie is out of the bottle, even if you repealed the 2nd Amendment, it wouldn't prevent existing gun owners from continuing to own firearms. Nor can you criminalize said ownership without it being unconstitutional, unless you all feel like messing around with the "ex post facto" provisions of the Constitution, in which case you're liable to end up with an armed revolt anyway. One I would gladly take part in.

It is not possible to increase safety without decreasing freedom, someone's freedom. Should there be better laws regarding who is allowed firearms? Absolutely. But that's about all you can do, and it's going to influence someone's freedoms.

Honestly, and I'm going to catch a lot of flak over this, this whole thing is overblown. We're talking about altering rights for millions of people, whether it's restricting guns or putting guards in schools, over 28 deaths. Is the loss of 28 children tragic? Sure, but their deaths need to be weighed against the rights of 300 million people. Quite frankly, I don't know that their lives are worth that, and I know that sounds callous, but emotional arguments are not how you run a country.

AGAIN, this is a local issue. So many you have such a nationalistic mindset that you don't even see communities, just smaller fiefdoms of the authoritarian whole. How do schools raise money? Bond issues and the like, which are usually voted on in some fashion. If Volpone doesn't want more taxes he'll vote against them when the issue comes up. It has fuckall to do with anyone not in his area.

On another note I routinely see one of the local officers around the school when I pick up Littleflow, he's talking to kids, parents and teachers, like a beat cop of old. He has a Glock on his side, I've yet to see some kid grab it and start shooting. I've seen his wife sucking THC lollipops at parties, and the last time he stopped me for speeding he gave me a warning and didn't even comment on the Ruger Mini 30 with 20 round magazine resting in the overhead gun rack of my truck. Imagine that.

It's not safety, it's safety theatre.

That's just not true. You can't criminalize past ownership, but you can criminalize future ownership without running afoul of the Ex Post Facto clause, regardless of whether such ownership is continuous with past legal ownership. It may or may not be wise or feasible to do so, and you can argue about whether and how the Constitution would require gun owners to be compensated for confiscated weapons, but it's certainly not an ex post facto problem.

Gee, who gave them the idea that it was a national thing?

Who could it have been?

So the money to pay for this massive influx of police is going to, what, come out of thin air? Spring up from the ground?

Even if it is a local issue, and comes down to voting on a bond issue, do you honestly think cash-strapped people in communities hit hard by a bad economy are going to vote to pay for more cops? Especially certain communities where neither tax increases nor armed government officials are looked on kindly?

Somewhere, someone down the line is going to have to pay for this terrible, terrible idea.

Are you willing to?