My kids school practice lockdown. It is as common as a fire drill. Just like the good old days :O: with the duck and cover for atomic blasts so too do my kids duck and cover to avoid a fully auto.

Another alternative i had seen somewhere:

arm veterans, and put them on campuses across the US with the job of protecting students and teachers.

1 you give the students one more positive hero type role model, and 2 you put another barrier in place between the innocents and the crazies

Come on, Tak. If I am armed and the shooter comes in my classroom, he's going to get a big surprise. That's part of the problem now--these nutjobs know the schools are a big, fat defenseless target. Guaranteed gun free. That's why the shooters kill themselves as soon as first responders arrive, they know they will face resistance. If it becomes established and well known that all schools have at least two competent armed on site personnel, these nuts will turn to daycares. :stare:

I don't like arming school personnel either, I hate it. But it makes more sense than being defenseless.

http://i48.tinypic.com/jl5m4g.jpg

And no, not happy Texas is #2 in gun homicides, that's terrible.

So long as they are still proficient, I am fine with that. And that line of defense is outside the classroom. Even outside the building. Alarms on windows and doors, particularly those that are out of sight of populated areas, are also a good idea.

You know how many visitors classrooms get in the course of a day. So, person X comes in and swings up his weapon, and you are going to put him down before he gets a shot off? Not likely. He knows you're armed from that sign, so he puts you down first, then turns on the students. And what is the alternative? Are you going to pull your pistol on every visitor you see and demand identification? Face it, once they are in the classroom it is already too late.

I also don't buy the deterence argument. That young man from last week had no intention of survivng the day. Neither did every school shooter going back to Columbine. They know that they will die, and have no intention of being taken alive.

Depends on what numbers you look at... Texas falls somewhere between #2 and #20 depending on which one of Tak's numbers you reference

http://i.imgur.com/98KkG.jpg

Here's some food for thought for ya...

Aww, man, you are not arguing seriously. :shifty: The shooters usually target and shoot the first person they encounter. In the case of SH, from the news reports, the Principal and VP heard shots and rushed to the shooter. In that case, they could have been able to put him down, if they had been carrying anything more lethal than a stapler.

Yes, the shooter is likely to get off the first shot and several other shots. But at least early on, onsite personnel can prevent him from leisurely entering a classroom and emptying clip after clip into a huddle of children.

No one is going to "pull a pistol on every visitor". That's not a serious point. Cops don't pull a pistol on every citizen they see, but they are effective once the criminal activity begins.
How many people in the building were armed?

check facts

he was on a military base, at a medical installation partially filled with civilian personnel, and was the only one in the room armed. thus he was not surrounded by people with weapons

If you did all of that then the next crazed gunman is going to just find some other softer target there always is a soft target somewhere.The other issue with this idea is that there might not be enough veterans that want to do this or that can.

Also as you said a cop would be the first target so would anyone else that could stop an attack so if they had guns in plain sight they become as much of a target as the cop would be. Honestly though I think the idea of a cop or other armed person being at a location is a big deterrent and would cause an attacker to either plan in great detail and plan to eliminate the threat or simply pick an easier softer target.

The speed at which they attack is another issue one would have to be combat ready gun at the ready 24/7 to truly be prepared to stop such a threat before they can do much or any damage.

I would say that most crazed gunman are more likely to simply pick a softer target where they can cause the most harm if one place becomes a hard target they will just find another location. Because their goal is to kill as many helpless people as possible.Many of them lately have also been wearing body armor which implies that they already expect someone armed to try and stop them and they wear body armor to make this more difficult.

correct...

fix the crazy, not the gun rights

Not so. If the floors were electrified you could have killed the intruder, the teachers and all the kids.

As I said in post #29, if one of the teachers who died trying to stop the attacker had been armed, it might have ended there.

Your "rebuttal" was meant to be silly, and it was.

Everything else you say in this post was true. The object is indeed to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and once he is in the classroom it is too late. That said, what I posted is also true. It might be too late to prevent the tragedy, but if one of those teachers had been armed the tragedy might have been reduced. It was too late to save some of those kids, but not too late to try to save some of the others.

We seem to be talking about two different things. You're talking about how to prevent the tragedy from starting, and again I agree. But this thread is about what to do once the shooting starts.

Ouch. I am arguing seriously, at least I thought I was.

At Sandy Hook, clearly the shooter did not shoot at the first person he encountered. He picked a kindergarten classroom; the smallest and most vulnerable students in the building. He was quite methodical in his selection.

Unless they think they can get there faster than the bullets, you can't prevent the violence in that classroom. And by that point, the other rooms are in lockdown, preventing the violence. Once that is done, the smart thing is to wait for law enforcement to arrive, which shouldn't take long, not to play GI Joe. You've seen how many cops hang around schools.

I thought it was quite serious. After all, once the killer is in the building without sounding the lockdown, it is the only way you are going to stop him from drawing and shooting in the first place. After all, he has spent a lot of time thinking about how he is going to do it. The teacher is the one who has to react to it, and that teacher isn't thinking about potential threats and sizing up his target. He is thinking about the lesson, the homework and how he is going to get those two knuckleheads in the back of the room to stop kicking each other's seats and actually do their work.

Thank you for telling me what I actually meant. Now you are being deliberately obtuse. We're done here.

I think it's absolutely true that guns are not the problem, but guns are not the solution either. I'm all in favour of responsible people being armed, but how do you gauge responsibility? And how do you filter out the crazy?

Look, we know everything about guns, but we know remarkably little about mental illness. And I find the idea of "fixing crazy" with a bullet to the head remarkably offensive if not outright fascist. I think resources could be far better-spent preventing this with a more long-term view and investment into public healthcare than a paranoid "shoot on sight" mentality.