Georgia's second-largest school district has approved a policy to allow personnel who are not certified police officers to carry guns, part of its response to the shooting at a Texas school that killed 19 children and two adults two months ago.
The Cobb County school board voted 4-2 at a meeting on Thursday to adopt the policy as a way to bolster the number of staff carrying guns at a time when finding new police officers is difficult. The policy would exclude teachers from carrying guns.
I suppose that might be better than nothing, but the difference between that and nothing would be hard to measure.
A bunch of cops, all armed with rifles, some wearing body armor and carrying ballistic shields, stood around in a hallway in an Uvalde elementary school for over an hour, paralyzed by fear. In Buffalo, a retired cop, serving as a security guard, got several hits on a mass shooter; but the bad guy was wearing body armor and killed the security guard. To expect marginally-trained civilians with handguns to go up against an assailant, who is armed with a repeating rifle, is asking a lot. Probably the only way that is going to work is for the man with the handgun to adopt a tactic espoused by Uncle Fester: Shoot him in the back.
More precisely, since those evil bastards have taken to wearing body armor, shoot him in the back of his neck (or his head, if he's not wearing a helmet). It's the safe way, but will a civilian be well-treated by the criminal justice system for gunning someone down? Will they be reviled on social media for an act of cowardice? Will the family of the dead wannabee mass-shooter sue? Will the school board defend that person?
Being armed with a handgun and going up against a shooter armed with a quick-firing rifle sounds like trying to knock down a raging conflagration with a fire extinguisher. The prudent course is to get out and hope that your local pros are not lilly-livered pretend cops, who are only good for abusing children and minorities. Like in Texas.
17 comments:
The Western where the farmer does that to the gunslinger who'd been terrorizing the town...farmer says: "He's dead, I'm alive, and that's the way I wanted it to be".
You do do realize , that had the one cop who had a chance to take him out as he was first entering the building. Had he done so. Would have been crucified by the media and public.
I've long thought that only combat experienced veterans should be hired as policemen. As is well known in the military, no one knows how you'll react to live fire coming your way , until you actually have been there.
Big talk is cheap but not a good replacement for experience.
Stewart, a more modern example would be the shooting of Ken McElroy in 1981. That one fell under the unoffical doctrine of "h needed killin'."
Spud, we have over 800,000 cops in this country. And we're going to run out of new combat vets, unless things start getting hotter in Europe.
CM: mightn't it be that the vets have done enough for their country, been there, done that, don't want to go back?
Spud, pure speculation. Nobody knows what would have happened if the cop would have put the assailant down. We do know what happened when the Uvalde police didn’t do the job they were hired to do. They served, but didn’t protect.
Dale
The one problem with the outlined situation you created is that it is clear the “solution” would be to remove the quick-firing rifles from the equation…just saying….and I stand by suggesting the 2nd has reached its high point, and a steady chipping away will begin shortly.
Seems to me relying on Vets, especially those that have seen
the elephant is asking much. Bad enough what is seen can't
be unseen but to do it again makes for much chaos.
At the same time those feel they are safe and its
"someone elses job" may need to step up and realize
their responsibility. They may be that someone else.
No good solution. Proper training will keep the
negligent injuries and collateral damage down.
In depth training will help those that participate
understand what they are getting into and what
they can expect afterwards.
Eck!
My experience most of the cops are vets, though not necessarily combat vets. A lot of wannabe action goin' in there, maybe some envy, mostly because it messes with your head. In a way a cross-section, a microsm, of a larger issue few see.
Just this vets' thought ...
Let’s keep pretending the 2nd Amendment means anyone not certifiable can stockpile a horde of fun bang tools that would suffice for a company of American soldiers. What could possibly go wrong?
This Monday morning there is a report of a "good guy with a gun" taking out a bad guy at a mall in Indiana after he had already killed three people and wounded others. The problem with a situation like this is if someone were carrying a rifle in a place where a rifle isn't normally carried how does one make the decision to shoot first. Do you wait until the person starts shooting, then it's too late or is he just one of those open carry people who are just trying to make a point and rattle people. The results of that snap decision could either be you area hero or facing murder charges.
“I've long thought that only combat experienced veterans should be hired as policemen”
Spud, somehow I don’t think more militarizing of police, treating cities like war zones, and hiring police based on their readiness to employ violence is the answer to policing in America.
Dan, there have been a number of instances in which the good guy with a gun ends up getting shot by police, or another good guy with a gun, who show up late, misinterpret the situation and shoot the wrong person.
Whether it's the police or one of these school employees armed to augment any presumably more thoroughly trained police, any good guy with a gun faced with one or more bad guys with guns in a school full of children is very unlikely to be able to walk the very fine line between the application of force on the bad guys that will prevent them from harming the schoolkids, and that force itself harming the children as collateral damage.
What's the acceptable ratio of killed-by-friendly-fire to killed by the bad guy? If you are the good guy whose bullets have any chance at all of killing a kid, I suspect the ratio goes way down compared to what you would calculate in some thought experiment where the children's lives were purely an abstract concept. And even if the good guys in question were able to set aside the reluctance to personally kill a child as collateral damage, in favor of following an abstract ratio to the abstract projected minimal loss of life, insofar as you succeed in stopping the bad guy, you drive up the final ratio achieved. The projected minimal loss of life is exactly that, a projection, and you will never know whether the alternate universe in which you held back from shooting the bad guy had a lower ratio.
It is quite common to criticize the police at Uvalde for not going into that class guns blazing, and to impute to them fear of losing their own lives as the reason for what, in retrospect, might very well have lowered the total number of children killed. I suspect that the fear of killing a child themselves in the blaze of gunfire was a more powerful motivator. We absolutely do not want to motivate the responders at any future similar incident to reach automatically for the guns blazing option, in a school filled with children.
There is no good way to handle such an episode once we let it start. The only way here is to keep it from starting. Take guns away, from both bad and good guys, except under the most stringent controls. If we so far fail to control the ability of bad guys to get guns that we even think that having armed police or quasi-police in schools is at all a good idea, that tells us that we really, really need to improve our control on bad guys having access to weaponry, and not stop going in that direction until the very suggestion of arming school personnel is generally seen as the lunacy it ought more clearly to be in any universe.
Spud, the typical policeman in this country never fires his weapon with intent to harm during his entire time in uniform. What you are suggesting is basing police hiring on something that may occupy one minute of a thirty year career. What we need in this country are police who have had years of training, the way they do in Europe, rather than the weeks or months that recruits get here. But of course, then we run into the real problem: Conservatives who want to lock millions of people up, but will never vote to pay the taxes that it takes to do it in a civilized manner.
What I get a kick out of, dan, is all those open-carry types packing an unloaded AR around a WalMart don't seem to have a clue as to easy it would be to take it away from them, ballbat them across the face with the butt of it ...
The OC assholes are a different story.
The scenario posted came to pass yesterday in a shopping mall in suburban Indianapolis. The killer had a rifle, the man who terminated his spree had a handgun.
The mall owner doesn't want people carrying guns in the mall. Fortunately, the kid with the handgun ignored (or was ignorant of) that. In Indiana, that seems to be not a problem, for it's not a criminal violation unless he was asked to leave and refused.
In New York, that would be a felony and so the shooter would have been free to kill more people.
Florida company offering bulletproof, steel shelters to be installed in classrooms. Looked at the picture, it’ll take a bit of cramming to get the whole class in…plus it has air vents. Let’s say ass-wipe enters school…lockdown drill activated…kids and teachers enter shelters…asswipe proceeds to squirt a flammable fluid into the vents and introduces a flame…proceeds to next classroom…
Sooner of later every solution that avoids the base problem will be “solved” by murderous ass-wipes. The base problem is ass-wipes with high capacity weapons, not addressing that ignores the problem, but that doesn’t bother a leadership cadre unwilling to make any “risky” decisions.
Bulletproof shelters didn’t work do well for NYC subway token clerks.
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