Suggest ways to protect school age children.

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About 33% of the population owns a gun.

I would guess teachers are far lower on that ownership scale. They tend to be liberals because they believe in what they do, not after the big bucks.

So, maybe 5% of teachers are gun owners and how many want to carry a gun in the classroom.

Maybe POTUS should ask the teachers and not tell them?

No research, not data, not backing that it would do anything but there it is.
 
ID cards that can be scanned may need to be issued to school students to pass through some sort of screening prior to entering the building. So, some physical modifications to most schools will have to happen. The key is to not allow the shooter inside the building. Stop them in the parking lot and be pretty ruthless in the enforcement.
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Scope out the school, ID a kid that walks to it alone, take his ID card and away we go.
 
So, maybe 5% of teachers are gun owners and how many want to carry a gun in the classroom
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How big of a percentage do you need. I graduated HS in 95 so the numbers may not bear out. I had experience with something like 30? high school teachers.

I know, for a fact, three of them were fully capable of being armed and handling any threat that would have entered their classroom as skillfully as anyone. Oddly enough two of their classrooms were right across from one another. I can think of four or give more that probably would have taken the responsibility and, if they did not have the skill, developed the skill to handle the situation. Add in a couple members of the support staff who I know would have been able to respond and you have a pretty good "standing guard" for a school that had less than 800 students.

I don't need all teachers to be armed. In fact there are some teachers who simply are not willing to use force, some that should not have access to a firearm because they might start the shooting, and others that would not have the time and mindset to prepare. Still it would not hurt to have those willing to put in the time and effort to be prepared be allowed to be equipped.
 
RC20 said:
About 33% of the population owns a gun.
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I think you mean that about a third admit to having one even when asked by a complete stranger who hasn't any business asking.

RC20 said:
We fortress the school and we have a fire (more likely) and we burn how many kids to death because they can't get out?
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Indeed. Pursuing a single goal to the exclusion of all others isn't reasonable, but it can happen when people lack perspective.

RC20 said:
Yep, Arm the Teachers! How many teachers want to be armed?

Well lets force them to carry guns! Cops kill innocents all the time, how well does a teacher do who even wants to carry a gun? And those who want to carry should?

Don't get me wrong, police have a tough job, but they are trained and they still do some really stupid things because they are not suited to their job. Nothing weeds out the ones who pass the tests but should not be.

Armed teachers are going to be better?
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Is forcing teachers to be armed a real suggestion?

Police do some stupid things...and some brilliant things, and some merely helpful things. So long as we aren't asking teachers to perform traffic stops or set drug buying stings, the stresses and ambiguities of police work seem less than completely relevant.

RC20 said:
Maybe time to agree to see if there are solutions that work.
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Don't we mostly have one that works already? If we already prohibit felons, domestic violence misdemeanor violators, the involuntarily committed and illicit drug users from possessing arms, how many more people belong on a prohibition list?

Bartholomew Roberts has noted that having the NICS check tied to a specific arm or arms is antiquated or irrelevant to safety. Many have noted that making a school a gun free zone invites the problem. What looming but unsolved problem remains?

RC20 said:
18 year old kid can't drink, but can buy an AR with no community background check.
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What is a "community background check"?

 
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The worst school attack in American history, did not involve firearms. The BATH BOMBING. Evil always finds a way. Jim
 
I was in the Electronic Alarm/Security Surveillance field for decades. What most do not know is that there are dedicated High Tech security systems designed specifically for High Schools and Colleges. More than just card entry which is dated.
Not only modern Turnstiles, and facial recognition, finger print etc., but the ability for one Security staff member to lock down any door on Campus with a simple Smart phone.
The bottom line? That kid should have never entered that school period. And It was totally preventable. The School systems do not want you to know that technology exist.
And they should be held accountable.
The security of modern day schools is a total JOKE. And they know this. Much easier to blame a AR as they say.
Make the gun the bad demon. Plant it as the fear, make it the evil.
And of course the real evil is the fact that the Gun, is really just a wedge issue. It is from all the media and Propaganda to focus on the gun as the Party of evil.
The Liberals will use "Fear" as a tool to get voters. It really is not about the gun at all. and there is a sucker born every day. CNN will make millions off of this shooting. They will exploit the murder's over and over. The Fake news is a curse to American.
 
There is absolutely no problem with having armed police officers in the schools. Not only would they end the careers of potential mass-murderers very, very quickly, the mere presence of police officers or a police substation inside a school will deter many regular crimes that seem to plague a lot of schools across the country. Things like drug activity, violent gangs and street crime have been occurring in schools now too, and the presence of police in schools will certainly give potential troublemakers a new reason to be concerned.

Also we can improve the safety of students themselves by offering martial arts courses for physical education programs. Sure, in the 1970s, football and baseball are the main courses to be taught in PE but realistically, not everyone are into these sports or will choose them as a career. Why not offer something that will empower students and also teach them self discipline and responsibility while also giving them valuable tools to defend themselves in case the worst happens? Not everyone can be trained like a first responder or a leader in a life or death situation, but offering such programs in school can and will create a group of people who may be able to remain calm and level-headed should a crisis occur and make essential decisions for the safety of all those around them.
 
The point about fortification is well taken. You can go around fortification. Look at the Maginot line.

At the schools near me, at dismissal times you have dozens of little kids lining up for the school buses on a city street.

We have day cares full of dozens of pre-schoolers. You have concerts, supermarkets, etc.

There is no good solution - you need people on the spot to respond.

However, better reporting might stop of these monsters. True, they might go to illegal sales but you don't know how many might give up. It's knowable.
 
We were talking about this at work over the last couple of days. We older people remember when there were mental hospitals, and we agreed that some people need to be in that kind of facility. Not locked up in a prison type place, the local one was like a village. The patients had jobs if they could do one, there was a store, and they were made to take their meds. If they walked away, the police took them back.
Now a lot of these patients wind up in prison after going off their meds, and others, like a friend's daughter, get involved with law enforcement every so often after going off her meds because she feels "dead inside".

Thinking back to when I was in school in the '60's and '70's, there are only a few teachers who I thought were stable enough that I would have wanted to arm them. The younger people feel the same way about the teachers from just 5-7 years ago, so I'm assuming that it's across the board. I can think of 2 of my grade school teachers I would be okay with arming, and another 3 in high school. Of the 3 armed (They concealed, badly) security officers we had in my high school, there was only one I thought was sane enough to carry. The other two were overly aggressive bullies, both ex HS and college football "heroes" that were hated by many of us kids. There was another male teacher I thought was ok, and a couple of female teachers. This was about 10% of all the teachers I knew.

I think the solution to reducing these incidents is to put a cop into every school. Yes, it's expensive, and it won't be a sure thing, but it would probably reduce the chances of it happening, just by his being there. A couple, just a couple, of armed teachers would be a help, as the police officer would be a logical "first target" for a shooter to take out. No matter what is done, there is no way to totally prevent this kind of thing from happening. If someone decides to go on a one way "mission", it's going to be very difficult to stop them with a law or reasonable security procedures. But myself, maybe because I have no kids in school, I don't feel the odds of it happening are sufficient to warrant spending a ton of money on security. Schools are in general, very safe. Get rid of glass doors and large windows that can be shot out and passed through, put cameras at the right places, and use common sense, something that appears to be in short supply anymore.
 
Some comments about teachers really bother me. They fall into two general categories and can be summed up this way:

#1. "Teachers are soft. They are not operators and therefore cannot be trusted with a gun." I may not be SEAL material, but 'soft', I am not. I am very proficient with firearms of all types, I'm a veteran, a black-belt, and an NRA instructor. I have a warrior mindset. Just because some teachers shouldn't be armed, don't assume that we are all alike, and don't preclude me from being armed because I am 'just a teacher'.

#2. "Teachers have enough to worry about, they shouldn't have to worry about being sheepdogs, they just need to teach." That's great. Except that we are already expected to protect the children entrusted to us. We make sure everyone is out of the building during a fire drill, we are mandatory reporters of suspected neglect or abuse, and it's why we HAVE TO break up fights. If things go sideways, I have to shift gears and give my students what they need in that moment. On 9-11, I had to become a psychologist, grief counselor, and father figure. I am already expected to protect your child. Now please let me have the option of having a weapon to do it with.

If we were really serious about hardening our schools, we would send a team to Israel and see how they do it.
 
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RC20 said:
About 33% of the population owns a gun.

I would guess teachers are far lower on that ownership scale. They tend to be liberals because they believe in what they do, not after the big bucks.

So, maybe 5% of teachers are gun owners and how many want to carry a gun in the classroom.

Maybe POTUS should ask the teachers and not tell them?

No research, not data, not backing that it would do anything but there it is.
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Agreed, but that still equals some resistance from within the schools by the teachers that do CHOOSE to carry.

I think 5% is actually a real close number, and probably on the conservative side in a state like Florida. So if you take the number of students at this school (3000) and say there are 30 students per teacher that is 100 teachers. Probably 25 admin.

That would be 6 armed adult CHL holders all around the campus. Better odds to me than 4 officers taking up positions behind there cars when all the shooting is almost over.
 
HughScot said:
If someone doesn't come up with a real solution to protecting children while at school people will pass legislation that we won't like.
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Let's deputize all the Washington alphabet soup agencies, and place them in our
schools as U.S.Marshals, guarding our children. Re-purposing THEM would be a lot
cheaper than getting new people. Many of these agencies have been in operation
for decades, with NOTHING to show for it. NOW they can man up, step up, and do
something worthwhile, for a change. BUH-BYE, FBI, NSA, TSA, EPA, IRS, etc, ad nauseam...
 
Before you get preachy about teachers, look at how many folks have CCW credentials of some kind. The percentage is low. Look at how many of them actually carry religiously, the percentage is low. Look at how many have any significant training - the percentage is very low.

So let's drop the gratuitous insults about a class of folks who want to work with kids. We don't give a crap here if they are liberal or conservative. We don't do that.

Also, no one is suggesting arming all teachers. Don't blather about that.

I will delete any more holier than though rants.
 
Protecting Our Children in School

I am sure that someone will not like this response. To all of you I apologize. There are too many laws now, almost all too expensive, difficult, and impossible to enforce now. We need fewer laws and greater accountability, not more laws and more dispersal of accountability. The paid professionals in the community are accountable. Those in charge at the time should resign and be replaced by new folks who understand that the laws need to be enforced. This needs to start at the community level and go to the families of all those impacted. Once that happens the movement of accountability needs to proceed to the next largest entity until it comes to the state. Our Constitution demands this and so should all of us.
 
I can think of hundreds of ways to fortify a school, for panic locks to all the doors, funneling all the kids into x-number of doors with metal detectors and armed guards, arming the teachers who want to be armed and willing to take the training.
And after school starts, any visitor can only obtain access via one door that lead into a room where the employees are behind bullet proof glass and they can open another door into the school via an electronic lock system.
However, if you have some crazy nut case who wants to shoot kids with whatever gun they can get a hold of, they can wait till the kids are in the parking lot. Then they can use a semi-auto up close to kill a lot, or they can find a bell tower somewhere and fire away like Whitman did years ago.
Raising the age won't stop the determined nut from getting a gun, didn't stop Lanza. More info in background checks MIGHT have stopped a shooting or two; no one can say for sure.
And if you get rid of all the guns....knives can be used. Just look to China, one guy killed 12 in a mall, a few guys killed over 33 in a station all with knives.
Or do what the guy did back in the 20s in Bath MI, blow it all up.
There is NO way to totally protect the kids or anyone for that matter. Even if there was one cop for every kid, it cannot do the job.
 
Advertising how something is gun free and screaming come here to unleash your evil because we are a soft target sure isn’t helping.
My church and my father in law’s church, my pastor and his priest have both reached out to the congregation for ccw holders to step up and discreetly assist with security.
Time to step up. In the movie We Were Soldiers, the portrayed Joe Galloway said he was a non combatant and Sam Elliot replied that there was no such thing today...yep, time to step up.
 
Thinking about this I made a realization about the scale of the hardening every school in the US. Doing so would likely exceed the scale of the conspicuous domestic security and site hardening accomplished in WWII. If one REALLY wanted to do it the first step would be to significantly reduce the number of sites by combining schools to central campuses.
My School district has one HS, two MS, 8 ES, and two pre-K. 13 locations.
There are nearly 130,000 schools nationwide.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
If wikipedia is correct and there are currently approximately 1.2 million full and part time officers in the US, then 10% of the police force would be securing schools. Really more since you would need an officer from the beginning of sports at 6am to the end at 10pm and on weekends.
Just hiring new officers isn't as easy as it sounds. The closest large city recently reduced the educational requirement of officers because they were having trouble recruiting.
Nowhere close to practical.

There is nothing stopping schools from hiring armed guards now. There is nothing stopping one of you from starting an armed guard service that specializes in school protection and employs guards at reduced rates and charges the schools reduced rates. If there are all these vets willing to volunteer they should be willing to do it for minimum wage with proper liability and workman's comp insurance also. If you think a current teacher is suited to the work then a recently retired teacher should be as well. Teachers are eligible for benefits as young as 51 years old.
 
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