Our Teachers Should Be Allowed To Arm Themselves

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There was an excellent article up on Most Wanted last week discussing the gun control debate, it’s a must read. In it the author, Larry Correia, argues that armed teachers should be allowed in our schools.

The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.

Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.

However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.

So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?

The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.

The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.

But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.

But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.

Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.

Take it from a cop….we can’t be everywhere. In South Central there are many of us, but by the time we get the call it still takes us minutes to get to a scene. Shootings, stabbings, murders and everything in between happen in seconds. In a low crime, rural area, it could be quite awhile for the nearest cops to arrive.

One armed teacher would delay and/or stop the threat to young children.

Contrary to the hyperventilating liberals, no one is advocating that teachers should be mandated to carry a gun. As Larry argues above, make it voluntary. One state that does has concealed carry classrooms filled to capacity with teachers:

More than 200 Utah teachers are expected to pack a convention hall on Thursday for six hours of concealed-weapons training as organizers seek to arm more educators in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting.

The Utah Shooting Sports Council said it normally gathers a dozen teachers every year for instruction that’s required to legally carry a concealed weapon in public places. The state’s leading gun lobby decided to offer teachers the training at no charge to encourage turnout, and it worked.

Organizers who initially capped attendance at 200 were exceeding that number by Wednesday and scrambling to accommodate an overflow crowd.

And as the scumbag Piers Morgan blabbers about changing our Constitution (and the Bible) we have newspapers printing the addresses of gun owners (while simultaneously printing the addresses of those who DONT have a gun to defend themselves…friggin idiots).

Jack Dunphy:

Based on what we’ve heard so far, this “conversation” amounts to little more than an attempt by one side to shame the other into silence and acquiescence. If you refuse to admit that you, the gun owner, are part of the problem; if you dare to suggest that the public at large would not be less safe but safer if more law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry concealed handguns; if you refuse to acknowledge what is so patently obvious to your enlightened betters living in colonies along both coasts — which is that firearms are inherently evil and have no place in a civilized society — then you are an abettor in the slaughter of children and deserving of public scorn if not imprisonment and even death.

Indeed, this “conversation” has been marked by ignorance and emotionalism on the part of those who would see Americans surrender their guns in advancement of the utopia envisioned in such places as the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Manifesting this ignorance and emotionalism for all to see was CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, who, while engaging in what was purported to be a “conversation on guns” with economist John Lott, seemed gobsmacked when Mr. Lott presented an argument in favor of fewer restrictions on citizens carrying concealed weapons — an argument based on his own extensive research. “I have to say,” stammered Ms. O’Brien, “your position, your position completely boggles me, honestly. I just do not understand it.”

That she did not understand Mr. Lott’s position was obvious, as she was so completely boggled that she failed to address even a single one of the points he made, instead veering off on tangents that did little more than reveal her own lack of knowledge on the subject at hand.

…All the heated rhetoric that has followed the horrors of Sandy Hook obscures the legitimate questions we so yearn to have answered: could the gunman have been stopped, and can future madmen be prevented from carrying out similar crimes? Is there a law that might have been passed, are there steps that might have been taken, could anything have been done to protect those precious children and those who cared for them?

I suspect that those who seek a legislative solution to crimes such as this one are on a fool’s errand. It would be difficult to tabulate the number of laws the gunman broke in the course of his murderous spree that morning; to think the enactment of one or a dozen more would deter such a man is to engage in childish fantasy. And talk of banning “assault weapons” is equally naive, not least for the fact that the very term has no real definition other than to describe rifles that some people find scary-looking.

Could he have been stopped? Yes. By someone armed and ready to take the shooter out or at least draw his attention away. Can future madmen be prevented from doing this again? No. There is evil in this world, always has been and always will be. Even putting away hundreds of thousands into mental institutions against their will, as we did in the past, didn’t stop it. Take away the guns?

Meat Cleaver: A man charged into a kindergarten in northwestern China with a cleaver Wednesday and hacked to death seven children and two adults.
knife: a man used a knife to kill eight children and seriously wound five others in the city of Nanping.
Hammer: Wang Yonglai used a hammer to cause head injury to preschool children.
Box Cutter: a female worker slashed eight children with a box-cutter at a daycare center for migrant workers.
Axe; two young girls and four adults taking their children to nursery school were killed with an axe.

And as we all know 2,996 people were killed by those only armed with box cutters on 9/11.

No, we can stop them by allowing teachers to be armed. Preventing them from ever happening again is fodder for liberal hippies who believe the world can be rainbows and unicorns someday if only there was enough hashish to go around.

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@Wordsmith:

I haven’t looked at recent stats, but comparisons between countries can be like apples to oranges when you look at what the gun violence is based upon (gang violence? Citizens protecting themselves? Accidental? Homicides? Police shootings?), size population, homogenous culture vs. multiethnic, cultural values, etc.

Forgot to mention: Aren’t gun-deaths anywhere from 55% to 80% due to suicide and not homicides or accidents? I’d agree that if there were less guns around, the rate of suicide deaths might be slowed (although aren’t other means still ahead of firearms when it comes to suicide deaths?) So why not push for gun legislation based upon the latest suicides or mass suicides by guns rather than by homicide deaths due to gun? Because it sounds sorta ridiculous? Kinda like when blaming guns for accidental deaths when swimming pools, auto, and bicycle accidental deaths cause more deaths than accidental gun deaths?

Alcoholism plays a factor for around 30% of suicides. We know that drinking and driving are a bad combination. Why not call for more anti-alcohol laws and more alcohol-free zones than currently on the books?

@Wordsmith:

There are over 10,000 murders by firearm, and that is the statistic I think most non gun owners are concerned about. It is worth mentioning though, in terms of mitigating accidents, cars are much safer now largely due to government regulation. There would likely be no air bag in the car you drive if not for safety mandates. There is no equivalent with guns, and gun manufacturers are protected by law from liability suits.

Back to the 10,000. The argument I keep hearing is those murders would have been done otherwise with something else. That completely ignores the destructive capacity of guns. Is it not reasonable to assume that a drunken fight with a gun is more likely to result in a homicide than a drunken fight with a knife? Gun homicides dwarf all other homicides. What reason accounts for this other than they’re very good at killing?

How does one interpret the NRA’s refusal to even consider eliminating the gun show loophole? People argue this is punishing law abiding citizens. That is not true. Background checks make it that much harder for a criminal or terrorist to buy a gun. Does an honest owner really not care whom he sells a gun to as long as he gets the best price possible? Asking people to take more responsibility in areas like background checks and safety seem like reasonable requests, but are met with across the board refusal. This is why I can’t take the NRA seriously when they say it’s all about the Second Amendment when all their positions point to it being all about maximizing the sale of firearms (which directly financially benefits the NRA’s main financial backers). As for most owners, they come across as selfish people more concerned with their personal convenience than with public safety.

@Wordsmith:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-do-we-have-the-courage-to-stop-this.xml

I encourage you to read this op-ed, which calls for, i believe, reasonable, measured steps that could be taken.

It includes this sobering statistic:

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence.

@Tom:

Gun homocides dwarf all other homocides.

Well, no, Tom the Troll, they don’t. Vehicular homocides are more numerous than gun homocides. But then, you would have known that had you bothered to research the FBI/CDC stats.

and gun manufacturers are protected by law from liability suits

And the auto industry is not? Please, why don’t you give us a list of all the family members who have had a loved one murdered by a drunk driver that has sued the auto industry for making a product that was capable of killing? Why didn’t MADD go after the auto industry instead of drunk driving laws?

Oddly enough, although you are trying to make a point to support your agenda (gun control with the emphasis on “control”) more children die from things other than guns. Just because the liberals can’t control the gangbangers in Chicago, doesn’t mean that children are dying in massive numbers due to gun related accidents.

As to your Harvard professor, David Hemenway, who donated $650.00 to the Barack Obama campaign, also thinks that soft drinks creates violence in teenagers. Nah, he’s not a leftist radical.

@retire05:

Well, no, Tom the Troll, they don’t. Vehicular homocides are more numerous than gun homocides. But then, you would have known that had you bothered to research the FBI/CDC stats.

Really???? http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

Well according to the CDC, there were 16,799 homicides overall in 2009, and 11,493 were caused by firearms. So i invite you to do the math. Is that the kind of research you are referring to, the kind you are obviously ignorant of? This is not the first time I have posted this data btw.

So do you stand by your statement?

@retire05:

Your rudeness in the face of your continued ignorance is utterly amazing. You don’t even know what law i am referring to that grants gun makers a liabilty shield, do you?

A donation to Obama invalidates statistical research? Why don’t you detail the flaws in his research for us?

@Tom:

Oh, that’s rich, Tom the Troll. You calling someone “rude”, lobbing insults when you are the biggest loser on this forum. How many times have I asked you the same five questions that you refuse to answer, trying to obfuscate, and spin as if you had answered them?

Tell me, Tom the Troll, do you agree with the New York paper that is publishing the names, and addresses, of all legal gun owners in two NY counties, with plans to add more counties to that list of journalistic intimidation? When someone gets robbed of their personal belongings, including their firearms, will you be happy? If some woman who is under protective orders is located by the man who abused her, and he kills her because that paper made her address public simply because she legally purchased a fire arm for her own protection, will you be happy? When the criminals discover the addresses that are not in possession of legal fire arms, and the residents are robbed, raped or murdered, will you be happy then?

You are a sick little man, Tom, along with being intellectually dishonest and a real pain in the ass.

Oh, and donations to Obama simply proves that your esteemed professor is nothing more than a radical liberal who thinks sodas make kids violent. Guess he supports Nanny Bloomberg’s restrictions on what the people of New York can consume. Yeah, I can see why you would want to refer to that professor. As for me, I’ll take Professor John Lott, who has been studing gun crimes for over 15 years. But you would discount him because he thinks people like you are the clueless gun grabbers you are.

@retire05:

Intellectually dishonest? Sort of like you ducking post 155 and not standing by/retracting your statement?

How many times in the last ten days, btw, has the subject been homicides and you come along and erroneously interject accident statistics? 5? 10? It get old having to explain the same thing to you over and over. If you can’t keep up, I suggest you respectfully refrain from putting your ignorance on display.

@Tom:

According to your own CDC website link, in 2009, there were 11,493 gun related homicides. That same year, 2009, there were 12,349 deaths of vehicle occupants, not drivers. So more passangers died in auto accidents than were murdered by guns. Odd, you never mentioned that stat.

So if the idea is to save lives, then certainly you have some solutions for more stringent vehicle ownership laws, right?

Nor do you ever mention these stats (which I’m sure have not gotten any better in the last five years):

In Baltimore, about 91% of murder victims this year had criminal records, up from 74% a decade ago.

Philadelphia – 75% of all murder victims had criminal records, up from 71% in 2005

Milwaukee – after a 39% increase in murders in 2005, they found that 77% of all homicide victims in the past 2 years had criminal records, with an average of 12 arrests.

Newark, N.J. – in the first six months of 2007, 85% of all homicide victims had criminal records, on a par with 2005 but up from the 81% of 2006.

Gangbangers killing gangbangers, Tom. And how many of those homicides do you estimate were done with legally obtained firearms? Are we too assume that the fire arm laws of those states are not effective in reducing the number of homicides? Can you honestly say, with the stringent gun laws in both Illinois and especially Chicago, that they have prevented bad people from obtaining illegal weapons? Because if you do, that makes you a liar, and you know it.

You just are too stupid to get it; law abiding gun owners are not the ones killing. And legal guns are not the ones being used to do the killing. Yet, none of your gun laws have ever prevented even one death by firearm. Ironicially, the states that the Brady Institute lists as the best on gun laws are the states that have seen a rise in gun related homicides.

The only one displaying their ignorance is you, Tom. And actually, I think you are too stupid to understand your own stupidity.

@retire05:

It’s sad to see how your pride outweighs your integrity, and that you would allow a factually inaccurate statement to stand under your name without correcting it. You obviously have very little respect for those readers who take you at your word that you would allow then to take your misinformation forward with them.

For those interested in the truth (you won’t get it from Retire), Retire’s statement that vehicular homicides outnumber gun homicides is factually untrue. It’s a shame I have to waste my time doing this factual cleanup for her, but at least now you know what statements written under her name are worth.

@Tom:

So, if the number of passengers who were killed in auto accidents through no fault of their own is 12,349 (I did not include the number of drives in that figure) and the number of gun related homicides was 11,493, you content that the number of gun related homicides is, in fact, greater of the two numbers? Are we to assume those passengers killed themselves?

You really are a piece of work, Tom. A pathetic piece of work.

@retire05:

For the tenth time, we were discussing homicides, not accidents, remember? Do I take it that your point is you are incapable of understanding the difference? Rarely does one encounter a person willing to parade their own stupidity as a tactic to win an argument.

@Tom:

Your stance on gun “control” is due to your thinking that if there are fewer guns because they are harder for even law abiding citizens to obtain, it will reduce the number of deaths by gun. Yet, you ignore that there is no outcry for more stringent laws on who can own/operate vehicles that cause even more deaths than guns. Why is that, Tom? Why are you not screaming to the roof tops for more vehicle ownership/operation laws to lessen the number of deaths in the United States?

You want to talk about gun related murders. End of story. You don’t want to discuss anything else related to the murder of Americans, mainly because it doesn’t fit your agenda.

Stupidity? Like I said, you aren’t even smart enought to know how dumb you are.

@retire05, #163:

Automobiles are not devices that are specifically designed to be efficient tools for the killing of other human beings.

If you agree that seriously unbalanced people, or convicted felons, should not be allowed to own machine guns, you’ve already accepted in principle that the Second Amendment does not confer an absolute, totally unalienable right. At that point it becomes open to discussion what additional restrictions are entirely reasonable and in the best interest of the general public.

That’s the discussion that the public is presently having.

@Greg:

Then by your standards, convicted felons should not be allowed to get a driver’s license, buy alcohol, or any other right that is limited by state laws. But they are.

So, do you agree that anyone who has not been convicted of breaking the laws of the nation should not be pressured to function under the laws that were designed, primarily, to keep guns out of the hands of those who have already violated the law and been convicted for those crimes?

Personally, I’m not okay with publishing the names and addresses of registered gun owners. That’s a slippery slope where we get ourselves into all kinds of invasion of privacy by anyone who disagrees with us about anything. Not cool. It also gives our political opponents a diversion to focus on rather than solve the problem we are facing in this country with a lack of reasonable, responsible, strict gun control.

With that said, arguing with people here isn’t going to solve the problem. We need to contact our representatives in Congress and tell them how we feel. For the most part, we liberals have the stronger hand there, and it’s the time to use it. It really doesn’t matter if they like us or not, we have to fight for what is right while the Dems have a stronger footing.

@retire05:

This is quite good!

Ever hear of New Jersey’s Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark?
An assessment done by the state in 2009 said Shabazz should be closed.
Its recommendation came with a chilling conclusion: The students had taken over the building.
Gangs fought inside and outside the main buildings.
Students smoked weed in the stairwells and wandered the halls instead of going to class.
Teachers were punched and beaten.
So brazen were the kids that much of the mayhem ended up on YouTube.
63% of the students graduate.
The school’s SAT average is 500 points below the New Jersey average!
Every student is searched, body and bags every morning.

The school nearly was closed.
But guess what saved it (so far)?
15 security guards!
The students call those 15 ”the biggest gang on campus!”

Also a football coach who can afford to put his entire salary plus more into school security.
More here:
http://www.nj.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/12/nearks_shabazz_high_school_fig.html

Retire, tom is not interested in debate. It seems to think it someohow outsmarting us by getting us to reply to it’s trollish comments. It repeats the same comments over and over and refuses to answer questions that undermines it’s claims. You are wasting your time.

@Wordsmith:

Word, Japan has a higher suicide rate than we do, and guns are a rarity there. They just find other ways to do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan

http://terrifictop10.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/top-10-countries-with-the-highest-suicide-rates/

@Hard Right: #170
Many years ago there was a 20/20 or 60 Minutes type show that did a story on the Japanese workers. It said that one reason for the suicides in Japan is their working as long as they do. At that time, Japan had a law that they can only work for a certain number of hours and be paid for them, but they could donate as many hours as they wanted for free. The more hours they would put in, the further up in the company you went. This also led to a lot of early deaths because of stress. The unions were company unions that encouraged the employees to work harder and more hours.

The reason you see Japanese tourists taking so many pictures, is that it will be the last vacation they take for years. Today’s teenagers are rebelling against the long work ours. They know how it was growing up without their dad around, and many of the dads not making it to retirement age.

@Hard Right:

The only troll on this thread is your best buddy, Retire, who busted in and successfully derailed an honest discussion with a factually incorrect statement, and refuses to set the record straight. She has demonstrated a complete lack of integrity, which I expect is why you feel such an affinity for her.

@Smorgasbord:

That’s what I heard. The new generation doesn’t want to miss out on life while working themselves to death. FWIU Japan has a rather rigid, conformist society. A shame society, even.
Althoug as there is a shortage of jobs there too, working yourself to death isn’t as big a problem.