The Hell? Another mass shooting

I remain unconvinced that an armed teacher would have stopped anything from happening. Introducing more guns onto a school campus is the completely opposite direction from making parents feel like their children are safer on campus.

With regards to classroom time, both the cop and the CCW average 8 hours training on firearms utilization policy. Cops wind up having to have more training after they leave the academy so they can learn departmental policies. Something citizens don't have to spend time on in either the academy or afterwards.
Most of the cops I know who teach CCW make sure the citizens are getting better qualitative training in that 8 hours than cops get at the Academy.

I find it very telling that you think a gun is atuomatically a threat that reduces safety, no matter who has it. Such an unrealistic attitude actually borders on paranoia.

Do you feel less safe with armed guards around than without them? If not, that completely invalidates your statement. If so, then there is clearly a problem with you, not with all guns.

It's not that it reduces safety--I fully acknowledge that it can be used defensively--but that the trade off between its safe uses and unsafe uses are not worth having them in schools.

Less safe. Armed guards are either protecting someone else or their property. Why should I feel safer with them around if I'm not the one they're protecting? They have no interest in me unless I get too close.

How ya figure?

When I go to airports, they're protecting me (among other people).

Because feeling fear in a situation where, barring extremely unlikely circumstances, there is nothing to fear (such as having armed guards who are there to protect the public, but feeling less safe simply because they are there) is one of the clear signs of neurosis, or even of psychosis.

Mine sure did.

If you, in a stress situation, lack the basic motor skills to take a key from a chain around your neck (or wherever) and unlock a desk drawer, you probably lack the basic motor skills to operate a firearm anyway. You getting shot is just Darwin in action. And maybe the next teacher will be better able to handle stress and keep his kids alive.

And I'm willing to bet that the CCW instructors warning from a couple of years before is the first thing that will pop into a persons mind when someone opens fire in a public area.:santa_rolleyes::santa_rolleyes::santa_rolleyes:

Right, but there's probably not any study or news reports that break down what shooters were CCW holders, which were not, what they did, etc. Or if those exist, there's not an easy way to search through them.

So then all we have available is speculation and logical or semi-logical assumptions and analogies.

It makes sense to me that given the known fact that soldiers and police officers have wounded other people than they intended to despite high levels of training and high moral character (generally speaking), that the typical civilian will occasionally do so as well.

That may be a relatively rare occurrence and "worth it," given the possibility of other better/luckier CCW holders actually personally stopping crimes, or the knowledge that some people are CCWs adding a level of general deterrence.

But I think it is something to consider.

You may be confusing causation with correlation. Some of these shootings seemingly have taken place at places that the shooter has a grudge against, and it just so happened that they were a gun-free zone.

The guy who shot up Fort Hood was not doing so because it was a gun-free zone, for instance. He was doing it because he was a) crazy and b) had a grudge against the people at Fort Hood or the military in general. It didn't matter to him that there were many people there who were armed or who at least had access to weapons.

It's not necessarily either/or. There are people who suicide-by-cop who don't seek high body counts, and there are people who do. There are people who want to do both.

One difference is that governments are willing to talk about all those things and act on them. We have a reasonable enforcement, more or less, of traffic safety laws. We have massive public education campaigns about saying no to drugs and drunk driving. One of the common complaints I've seen is that the government doesn't use the powers it has in the gun-regulation arena. Another from the other end of the spectrum is that politicians are too cowed to talk about anything having to do with guns for fear of backlash.

The industries and lobbying groups involved in at least some of those things do not take an absolutist stance and at the least help fund fairly massive educational efforts. We have tons of ads about the dangers of texting while driving, about just saying no to drugs, about knowing when to say when.

So I feel like we have made most reasonable efforts to curtail many of those other deaths. Not perfect, mind you, but about all we can be expected to do. I don't know if we have done all or even most reasonable efforts in the area of gun violence.

Another difference is accidental versus intentional. I would say it's harder to prevent accidental deaths versus intentional ones, and intentional ones merit a stricter response. (Which is why, the punishment for murder is greater than that for involuntary manslaughter, even if the end result is still the same.)

I'd rather make it an even smaller statistical blip by taking steps to prevent them.

In the area of swimming pools and bike helmets, we take at least some steps to help encourage safety. Many, if not all, states require people to wear bike helmets. There are probably equivalent regulations on swimming pools. I don't think there are necessarily enough steps taken to encourage gun safety.

Of course people do exactly what the government requires of them at all times.

It depends on the situation and the armed guards, what they are armed with, who they are, what they do, etc.

Remember all the outcry about the New Black Panther party idiots? They didn't actually harm anyone. They weren't armed with anything more dangerous than a nightstick. Yet there was (and is and should have been) considerable concern that because of their paramilitary clothing, because they were New Black Panther party members, their slurs, their demeanor and whatever else, that their intent was to intimidate, even though they supposedly were poll watchers. Such is a situation where the presence of armed guards made people feel less safe.

I don't think it paranoid to think that having military police with automatic weapons in a setting where they are not customary would make a person feel less safe. The threat would not be necessarily just from a fear that the military police are there for dubious reasons, although there's that. It would also the thought that if they are there is possibly an imminent threat of some sort. Being conscious of such a possibility would make me feel less safe.

Ignoring the fact that soldiers and police are trained and mandated to actively confront and engage people with firearms, whereas CCW holders are warned the opposite, Dayton was not speculating that a ccw holder might shoot a bystander or make the situation worse. He seemed to me to be speculating that a ccw holder WOULD most likely shoot a bystander or make things worse.

Trying for a little reason, and tired of my liberal friends posting insulting anti-gun memes, I wrote this on facebook yesterday:

Unfortunately only a couple of liberal friends seem to have seen it, two of my conservative friends tried to use it as a rant platform, and my drunk-ass friend Neil fucked the whole thing over with a billion adolescent incoherent misspelled one-line posts.

Oh well. I tried.

That last sentence is not accurate. Unless you are at an actual shooting range you will not be armed anywhere on an Army post. Gun control is very strict. In an Army hospital generally only the few civilian security guard at the entrances are armed. So basically only a handful of people, unless an MP or CID already under arms brings in a suspect needing a treatment or drunk test or whatever.

Fort Hood military personnel were not allowed to carry weapons on base during the shooting there. It was, for all intents and purposes, a gun free zone.

Yes, isn't it ironic (don'tcha think?) that after 22+ years in service to my nation I can't be trusted to carry a weapon around on post? I can't even come through the gate with a bow (unstrung even) unless it's in an approved case and the arrows are stored separately.

And I will next fall hunting have to walk past the Commanding Generals house with my bow in hand to get to some of the areas I hunt.

What a ridiculous argument.

Cops break up a lot of fights as well. I guess we should prohibit them from carrying a firearm since a dangerous adult could grab it and start shooting as well?

There are thumb-break straps and grab-proof holsters that can only release the gun when drawn by the wearer at a certain angle.

But I can actually see the merit in tafkat's point. I don't doubt a "troubled teen" might try to grab the gun.

The statement 'I am willing to bet' seems pretty common when people talk about CCW permits.

Of course they are.

How does "feeling less safe" automatically mean fear? I can feel less safe and still not be fearful.

Duly noted, stand corrected.

I think the flaw with that idea is who gets to pay for it. Some schools are pretty poor and can barely afford to pay their teachers, let alone a guard or two.

And does it really benefit anyone to lay off teachers to hire guards on the extremely remote chance of something like this happening?

At some point we need to accept that some things are so unlikely that they do not need to be prepared for, and that absolute safety cannot happen without giving up a lot of important things.

During the on-camera tag at the video link, the reporter says that the FBI is still trying to recover material from Lanza's computer, but he damaged the hard drive so badly that they're having a hard time.

If all of this is confirmed, you can bet that multiple legislatures, at state and federal levels, will start working on regulating violent video games and limiting access to them, just as strongly as they are doing with guns.

And that a lot of the people who are in favor of doing that with guns will suddenly change sides, and argue that limiting the freedom of people who aren't hurting anyone else is not justified.

When kids start throwing birds at pigs in real life, creating rollercoaster death traps, or taking up civil engineering for fun, the video game argument might have merit. But simple examination of the trend in youth violent crime shows a negative correlation with the prevalence of violent video games.

Get back to me when someone goes on a Gameboy massacre. Until then, you're comparing apples and razor blades.

Your arguments are irrelevant. This must be done for the safety of the children.

Thank you, Tipper Gore.

We can either abolish freedoms that millions enjoy--playing violent video games, watching action movies, owning guns--or we can identify and lock up those who aren't fit to function in society.

For me, it's an easy choice.

Or we could ban fear-based sensationalist news reporting.

Censorship, or just a different writing style? How would you have reported the Newtown incident?

Whaddya mean, 'start'? Didn't we all do that as kids?














...what?