NRA calls for armed police officers in all U.S. schools

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by flamesfever

If 40% of schools already have police, and they can be used for other purposes in addition to police work, and if volunteer auxilliary police can be used, what would you say then?

What price do you put on a child?

Having a cop who acts as a liason to several schools as well as handling other duties is wholly different than having a guard at each school from 8am till 5pm or later with coverage for vacation and sick days etc, this idea would cost a fortune, a fortune that would presumably come out of alreadt cash strapped school budget, would have almost no effect on the ability of a wack job to kill kids, it would just change how and where they do it. Instead of in the school they will just hijack a school bus (Dirty Harry anyone).

The idea has more holes than my grandfathers vest and is only being floated in a pathetic attempt to deflect from a workable plan that most other countries have adopted, keep guns out of the hands of most of the population that don't really need a gun.

[flamesfever]

Originally Posted by Mean Mr. Mustard

It would make me happy if people were talking about realistic solutions to a problem of an increasingly entrenched gun culture in the states. This includes an examination into mental health services offered (not a register of anyone with a mental health issue - something which is the most offensive "solution" to date), an honest appraisal of inequalities that exist in society, as well as looking at strengthening gun laws so that safety measures such as trigger locks for existing weapons and proper storage are heavily legislated and increasingly restrictions on current weapons sales in combination with gun buy-back programs.

I think that putting armed guards in elementary schools is a foolish, expensive, knee-jerk reaction based on the horrors of a single tragedy and would do little to actually work towards protecting society and would actually serve to normalize guns and weapons around children, which I don't think is good at all.

You don't think they are normalized now?

I am trying to look at it from a US (not Canadian) parent or grandparent perspective, and would probably feel more secure if an armed person, properly trained, was present.

I am assuming the US will exercise common sense and eventually degun itself. However, until that time, we have to deal with the present situation as it exists, and I see my proposal as a temporary measure.

Ok, to lessen the training cost, lets just limit the volunteers to retired police or military. There should be enough of them around in a sizable community.

I see this as strictly up to the school staff and parents, as to if and to how far they want to go with this.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by flamesfever

You don't think they are normalized now?

I am trying to look at it from a US (not Canadian) parent or grandparent perspective, and would probably feel more secure if an armed person, properly trained, was present.

I am assuming the US will exercise common sense and eventually degun itself. However, until that time, we have to deal with the present situation as it exists, and I see my proposal as a temporary measure.

Ok, to lessen the training cost, lets just limit the volunteers to retired police or military. There should be enough of them around in a sizable community.

I see this as strictly up to the school staff and parents, as to if and to how far they want to go with this.

I don't think the volunteer idea would fly due to liability issues, and more to the point is it really realistic to think that 500,000 or so volunteers can be found to patrol the schools forever, right now everyone is outraged but in a few months time when the outrage is gone there is no way to sustain that type of effort.

[Clever_Iggy]

A ridiculous, unrealistic, ineffective yet predictable response from the NRA. Incredibly sad.

[SebC]

How to commit mass murder at a school, step 1: become the "armed volunteer".

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by flamesfever

Admittedly the training would take a considerable amount of time, depending on how much prior experience the individual had. Perhaps the trainers could volunteer some time.

The candidates could be ex police, military, firemen, geologists, engineers, lawyers, judges, bank managers, priests, ministers, etc.

The training costs would be enormous, and you would almost create a whole new industry because nobody that's worth it would do that kind of training for free.

Training gun safety and marksmanship is lovely but it falls short of the type of training that is going to be required.

I get offended when this guy says that it would take him a hour to train a marksman. Shooting holes in a stationary paper target is easy. Shooting holes in a living breathing thinking human being who is shooting at you is a whole other thing and that's the mark of a marksman.


that ignores the fact that you could be putting a gun on Barney Fife, or god forbid the next great school shooter who happens to be ex police or military.

Though the image of a priest with a shot gun is kinda amusing for me and a possible movie script the idea of a volunteer force of gun toting vigilantes with minimal training and little over sight is terrifying to me.

Like I mentioned before it takes months and years to train an infantry soldier to learn how to function and use his weapons effectively in a chaotic and hostile environment. It takes longer to train a cop.

so lets say that there is a charge of a couple of thousand dollars to train a volunteer and there are a million schools, your talking a $2 billion dollar minimal startup not including the insurance that you'd need to buy and ongoing training costs.

Are we supplying them with weapons and ammo? Or are they bringing their own, because the image of a fat priest with a M-60 and a drum magazine would probably be tramatic to a 6 year old. Though a teacher telling students to behave or Father Johnson will dole out some hot lead punishment would be a benefit.

Its a stupid idea, you'd have no training standards, you'd possibly be hiring the next great school shooter, there are no guarantees that the school will be any safer. Its the perfect example of a reactionary solution instead of dealing with the root cause of easy access to excessive forms of firearms that are potentially be putting in the hands of nuts.

Its just a ######ed idea. You'd think it would appeal to someone like me, but if I'm repulsed by the idea there's a problem with it.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by SebC

How to commit mass murder at a school, step 1: become the "armed volunteer".

Paging Grahame James with a gun.

[jayswin]

Holy F-in jesus. I kind of left this thread because I felt bad about the posts I was making, as I could tell our American posters were getting offended.

When I left, I thought the suggestions to deal with these issues, while sidestepping the thought of actually dealing with the gun problem down there, were a little far fetched.....

But now we are at a point in this thread where the idea of retirees arming themselves and heading into schools to protect the children is being discussed?

My goodness, I don't even know what to say.

[LChoy]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

The training costs would be enormous, and you would almost create a whole new industry because nobody that's worth it would do that kind of training for free.

Training gun safety and marksmanship is lovely but it falls short of the type of training that is going to be required.

I get offended when this guy says that it would take him a hour to train a marksman. Shooting holes in a stationary paper target is easy. Shooting holes in a living breathing thinking human being who is shooting at you is a whole other thing and that's the mark of a marksman.


that ignores the fact that you could be putting a gun on Barney Fife, or god forbid the next great school shooter who happens to be ex police or military.

Though the image of a priest with a shot gun is kinda amusing for me and a possible movie script the idea of a volunteer force of gun toting vigilantes with minimal training and little over sight is terrifying to me.

Like I mentioned before it takes months and years to train an infantry soldier to learn how to function and use his weapons effectively in a chaotic and hostile environment. It takes longer to train a cop.

so lets say that there is a charge of a couple of thousand dollars to train a volunteer and there are a million schools, your talking a $2 billion dollar minimal startup not including the insurance that you'd need to buy and ongoing training costs.

Are we supplying them with weapons and ammo? Or are they bringing their own, because the image of a fat priest with a M-60 and a drum magazine would probably be tramatic to a 6 year old. Though a teacher telling students to behave or Father Johnson will dole out some hot lead punishment would be a benefit.

Its a stupid idea, you'd have no training standards, you'd possibly be hiring the next great school shooter, there are no guarantees that the school will be any safer. Its the perfect example of a reactionary solution instead of dealing with the root cause of easy access to excessive forms of firearms that are potentially be putting in the hands of nuts.

Its just a ######ed idea. You'd think it would appeal to someone like me, but if I'm repulsed by the idea there's a problem with it.

This post deserves more than a thanks. Wish I could post it on facebook or something

[Red Ice Player]

Gun advocates seem to have found the real villian in all this...Piers Morgan. He is a brit afterall...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...orman-deported

[Cowperson]

Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post a few days ago . . . .

People point to three sets of causes when talking about events such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings. First, the psychology of the killer; second, the environment of violence in our popular culture; and, third, easy access to guns. Any one of these might explain a single shooting. What we should be trying to understand is not one single event but why we have so many of them. The number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around 11,000 were gun homicides.

To understand how staggeringly high this number is, compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year — 3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people.

Many people believe that America is simply a more violent, individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes — theft, burglary, robbery, assault — the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.

The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.

So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t. The United States could do better, but we take mental disorders seriously and invest more in this area than do many peer countries.

Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized world.

The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...196_story.html

Cowperson

[Wormius]

^^ I think he hit the nail right on the head with "individualistic".

[Coach]

I think culture has a lot to do with it, just not "pop-culture" as most would reference (video games, movies, etc..). Any sane person should be able to determine the difference between reality and fantasy.

But the culture of a government that doesnt get anything done because of a fundamental beleif that they MUST oppose the other side trickles down into society where you have people who are deeply divided on almost every issue and any suggestion of something different is looked as an attack on them as a person. Or any mention of comprimise is a "loss" in the competition of life. These attitudes create mass tension.

And when you throw that on top of the fact that the government has become a fight for power amongst the few at the top vs a force for the people, people may feel that they only response that will get any attention is the extreme one. Maybe these people are trying to prove the point that guns are a problem, but because things the the NRA continue to block any shift away from guns, maybe they feel this is the only way to inact change.

[driveway]

Originally Posted by MattyC

But the culture of a government that doesnt get anything done because of a fundamental beleif that they MUST oppose the other side trickles down into society where you have people who are deeply divided on almost every issue and any suggestion of something different is looked as an attack on them as a person.

But this necessity of opposition is more pronounced - and more ingrained - in the parliamentary system see: Official Opposition

For most of American History the character of the American government could be described as compromise. For example, the Democrats controlled the House for all but two years between 1933 and 1995, a period which saw four Republican Presidents. It's only really been since 1995 and the impeachment of Clinton that the entrenchment of Democrat vs Republican thinking has entered the American consciousness.

[Sidney Crosby's Hat]

Anybody else looking forward to the next season of The Newsroom now?

[Sidney Crosby's Hat]

Originally Posted by Red Ice Player

Gun advocates seem to have found the real villian in all this...Piers Morgan. He is a brit afterall...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...orman-deported

Isn't Freedom of Speech also in the constitution?

[Caged Great]

Originally Posted by Sidney Crosby's Hat

Isn't Freedom of Speech also in the constitution?

Facts get in the way of a good argument according to republicans.

[SeeBass]

Originally Posted by MattyC

I think culture has a lot to do with it, just not "pop-culture" as most would reference (video games, movies, etc..). Any sane person should be able to determine the difference between reality and fantasy.

But the culture of a government that doesnt get anything done because of a fundamental beleif that they MUST oppose the other side trickles down into society where you have people who are deeply divided on almost every issue and any suggestion of something different is looked as an attack on them as a person. Or any mention of comprimise is a "loss" in the competition of life. These attitudes create mass tension.

And when you throw that on top of the fact that the government has become a fight for power amongst the few at the top vs a force for the people, people may feel that they only response that will get any attention is the extreme one. Maybe these people are trying to prove the point that guns are a problem, but because things the the NRA continue to block any shift away from guns, maybe they feel this is the only way to inact change.

I wouldn't think that the US has a monopoly on this either considering the history of many nations they are compared to.

[nickerjones]

Originally Posted by caged great

facts get in the way of a good argument according to republicans.

nm...

[Caged Great]

Originally Posted by nickerjones

Im sure you are aware that both sides have a history of ignoring facts to win an argument.

Yes, of course, it's just that lately it has mostly been a republican thing. If Dems were doing it to the same levels, we'd both be making comments berating them as well.