The Duchess of Zeon wrote:I think arming school personnel is perfectly viable, if they are required to be trained as well as police and are treated like police in liability terms. I'd prefer they arm the janitors and school administration staff though so the teachers can concentrate on getting the kids out of the line of fire, while it's the people who aren't managing classrooms who shoot back.
[Considers the prospect of having to add a police-quality or better security training regimen to all the other stuff he has to do]
[groans]
You know what? Just shoot
me.
Aaron MkII wrote:Really, I don't think this is a good idea. It might be workable as a temp solution until underlying issues are addressed bjt I think we should look elsewhere for solutions. Even fitting solid steel doors, armoured windows and not having the class interior visible from the corridor may discourage entry. At least it gives lockdown a meaning other then "execution"
Yeah, that bothers me at the moment. A complete lockdown that traps students in the classrooms just sounds like a way for a disaster to happen.
The Duchess of Zeon wrote:I'd pay for it with a 100% tax on firearms and 400% tax on ammunition. I'd be comfortable with that kind of cost increase. Not any more than that, though.
If you're willing to charge that much money
purely for school security... I'm going to be honest, we might get a better return from spending it on education itself. It might not save as many lives (a few dozen a year is a lot), but it'd sure improve a lot of lives (tens or hundreds of thousands a year is ALSO a lot).
Although where I work, just hiring three times as many security guards so we actually have enough manpower to patrol the halls consistently would be nice. Even if they don't protect very well against mass shootings, and I would be surprised if they didn't... I repeat, the mean time to a mass shooting at a given public school is roughly one hundred thousand years. That's assuming one mass shooting per year, which I'm pretty sure is a gross overestimate- there have been a lot of mass shootings, but not that many at schools since Columbine started the trend.
There are
so many better things we could do with 20-30 thousand dollars per building per year than garrison them all.
The Duchess of Zeon wrote: So we have people panic buying AR-15s who are still willing to support background checks of such a rigour that nobody in political power has actually proposed them! This goes to show that the democrat's gun control proposals are literally the worst possible, almost like they're calculated to prevent compromise.
Note that the Democrats did virtually nothing on gun control before Sandy Hook- the issue had been allowed to drift, more or less. It's only this event that's causing it: a knee-jerk reaction by people who simply think violence is bad and that removing it is good, QED concession accepted.
Meanwhile, American gun owners are conditioned to
expect that the Democrats want to take away all guns, whether they seriously try to do so or not. Therefore, every time we even have a brief national flurry of gun control talk, we see panic buys.