Thought Experiment about School CCW

Status
Not open for further replies.
Lots of schools already have armed security. I go to work at any high school, and there's usually at least one armed cop on-campus. Middle and Elementary schools aren't as heavily policed, but the high schools both in the area where I live and where I did my student teaching all have armed security.

But that doesn't mean that there's enough of it.
 
one armed cop
I take immense issue with this. Being in a building where one person has the means to harm everyone and no one else can do anything about it is very uncomfortable.
 
I take immense issue with this. Being in a building where one person has the means to harm everyone and no one else can do anything about it is very uncomfortable.
At least one armed cop. The school where I student taught had three. Most of the schools I sub at have one or two. They're great guys, on the whole. Never met a jerk cop in a school. What's your worry?
 
My worry is that if the cop ever decides to be a not so good guy it'll end up just like it would if someone else was shooting.
 
OK, you don't trust the cop to not turn into a mass murderer? Really? Steal a doughnut... I can see that. But when was the last time a cop opened fire on a crowd?

A little paranoia is a good thing. Too much is just... too much.
 
Sooooo your banking on the notion that the cop could go ballistic and shoot people, so we shouldnt have cop at the school and when an active shooter comes in we can blame the cops for not being there fast enough also??? What about cops that carry a gun while driving around all day???? Are you saying they couldnt do the exact samething???

Just doesn't make much sense........
 
I didn't say don't have a cop. But I'm not going to say I'd trust them any more than anyone else. I would rather take responsibility for my own safety.
 
An Extension of Volokh's Thoughts

The only answer to school mass murderers is IMMEDIATE armed response. While some will decry fighting violence with violence, it remains the only effective solution. We have fire extinguishers in all of our schools in case a fire breaks out. We should have "killer extinguishers" in place as well. An easy-to-use rifle, such as an M-1 Carbine or AR-15 in a securely locked container located at strategic points on the campus, and accessible only to trained school officials who carry keys might not save every life when a shooting rampage starts, but it would almost certainly lower the body count by orders of magnitude. The same locker could contain a "raid jacket" with body armor that would be instantly identifiable to responding police, lessening the likelihood that the armed school official would be mistaken for the shooter.

Moreover, the knowledge that schools are prepared to take immediate action to stop active shooters will deter many who might otherwise strive for the top "body count" and a sordid place in infamy.
 
Do you have a precedence for this concern? If so, I'd like to hear it.
My precedence is that I don't believe cops are special people. They are capable of all the things any other person is capable of. I don't think it's prudent to put your personal safety in the hands of someone else, especially when they have no real incentive to protect you.
I thought Eric M's first post was sarcasm...
Why is that?

With regards to the link I think armed staff would be good in the elementary and middle schools.
 
The presence of armed personnel is a pre-emptive posture. If it were properly publicized it would very likely discourage actions such as went down at Sandy Hook. No weapon drawn, no shots fired, very quiet situation.

An exception to this is the situation where the nut case is looking for suicide-by-cop. In this case, armed and ready is an essential response.

Dan
 
In my perfect world, anyone who presumes to take responsibility for my children for six hours a day will be armed and surrounded by other armed faculty.

I think arming faculty, having them trained in use of force in crowded situations and either mandating it for all or giving an incentive of some sort to those who do is the only workable solution stop these types of events. We've tried SROs, we've tried metal detectors, we've tried sensitivity training for publis education kids, we've tried blaming those evil guns. Nothing else seems to work. Time to recognize that this is the real world and play by big-boy rules. Try to hurt kids, you get gunned down.
 
Hasn't Israel been doing this since the seventies or so?
Yep.

Google "Israeli school shootings". Guess what, you won't find any. In a country surrounded by people that want them all dead and shoot at them every day.

Why?

Because their teachers are ARMED.
 
Eric M said:
My worry is that if the cop ever decides to be a not so good guy it'll end up just like it would if someone else was shooting.
...
I didn't say don't have a cop. But I'm not going to say I'd trust them any more than anyone else. I would rather take responsibility for my own safety.
...
My precedence is that I don't believe cops are special people. They are capable of all the things any other person is capable of. I don't think it's prudent to put your personal safety in the hands of someone else, especially when they have no real incentive to protect you.

Well, us dangerous police officers have been screened a heck of a lot more closely than the average CCW holder, and I'm already fine with the idea of a CCW holder being allowed to carry at the schools.

As a police officer, I have to laugh a bit at the paranoia that your posts on this subject seem to exude. A starting point for that discussion might include the fact that those of us in LE have undergone extensive psychological screening for serious mental health disorders like schizophrenia, and have also had every crevasse of our background examined before being approved for the job.

Don't get me wrong, there are some guys on the job who shouldn't be, but I've never heard of a police officer going so far off the deep end that they decided to become a school shooter. By your logic we can't trust anyone. If one cop can go bad, then two cops could form a conspiracy to commit the same act. Heck, the whole department might be rotten at that point, and take down the entire school.

Simply put, at some point this debate loses credibility, and I think we probably cross that line at the point when we start worrying that a police officer guarding the school might be destined to be the next school shooter. I'd much rather take that "risk" than leave the school completely unprotected!

But, that's just my $0.02 on the subject.
 
Wow. There really is some serious bass awkward reasoning going on in this thread.

Police get psychological assessments prior to getting hired as opposed to school staff who don't. But better to have an armed school staff than a trained policeman. Wow.

You're not going to like that we have lone pilots flying armed aircraft everyday in this country with no one to stop them from going nutso and attacking the civilian populace. And soldiers driving tanks that can't be stopped without special weapons. And individuals manning those special weapons.
 
My worry is that if the cop ever decides to be a not so good guy it'll end up just like it would if someone else was shooting.

Spend your mental energy worrying about the 944,855,256 other things more likely to happen
 
I don't know if there's a defensive solution to this. Gun-free zones are a joke, and teachers carrying could help or could not. I guess we do trust teachers with our children's safety and education, so trusting them with a firearm is not a huge leap, but I don't know if it'll get through, and what good it'll do is mostly speculative.

Call me naive, but I hate the "NEVER AGAIN" mentality. Your life, along with the lives of children, is in danger from psychopaths every day. If they want to kill you, even if you're a good fighter, *someone* can. Your pharmacist can poison you. A complete stranger could burn your house down while you sleep. The modern world is full of weapons, firearms or no. We will never clamp down on all of them, but this is not so terrible because it takes a uniquely horrible mind to do something like what happened in CT.

We live in a free society, and with freedom comes the fact that it could all come apart at the seams at any moment. However, it doesn't. The overwhelming majority of people don't want this, there are more good folks than bad folks. Think about it, what if 1% of gun owners went on mass shootings? That's 800,000 of 'em, by conservative estimates. Can you imagine? That's an apocalypse. But, it'll never happen.

Freedom means that we are all in danger to some extent, all of the time. The reason it works is because the overwhelming majority of us are not dangerous. We still have psychopaths, and they can still hurt us, but we form communities and help one another, and defend each other when we can (recognizing that we can't always). I think we should be really careful when it comes to building a society based on trying to prevent such occurrences by the truly lawless and amoral, and take comfort in the fact that something so horrible will, with overwhelming likelihood, not happen to us.

North Korea is perfectly safe (except from the gov't and starvation maybe), but it's still North Korea. People get hit by cars, but I still cross the street (though I always look both ways).
 
As a police officer, I have to laugh a bit at the paranoia that your posts on this subject seem to exude. A starting point for that discussion might include the fact that those of us in LE have undergone extensive psychological screening for serious mental health disorders like schizophrenia, and have also had every crevasse of our background examined before being approved for the job.

I am also a police officer and I don't discredit EricM's worry. I can think of two police officers that went crazy in Iowa alone in the last two years. One of which did commit murder and the other tried to disarm a DCI agent while he was under investigation.

I don't think it's a likely scenario enough to worry about, but we shouldn't be put on a pedistal and say that an officer will never go crazy. You're right in that we have been thoroughly screened and checked, but the checks are not ongoing (at least for us they aren't). It's a one time thing once hired and then you're not screened or background checked again unless you use lethal force.

I'm not trying to bash LE, I'm just saying it's not impossible.
 
I don't think it's a likely scenario enough to worry about, but we shouldn't be put on a pedistal and say that an officer will never go crazy. You're right in that we have been thoroughly screened and checked, but the checks are not ongoing (at least for us they aren't). It's a one time thing once hired and then you're not screened or background checked again unless you use lethal force.

I'm not trying to bash LE, I'm just saying it's not impossible.
What I would like to know is the relative unlikely frequency of LE going crazy compared to the relative unlikely frequency of spree killings. What we're talking about are two statistically small events here.
 
so trusting them with a firearm is not a huge leap, but I don't know if it'll get through, and what good it'll do is mostly speculative.

Not to the Israelis.

They are surrounded by people that -actively- want them all dead, and shoot at them every single day. But no mass school shootings.

Why? Their teachers are armed.
 
There has been an armed sheriff's deputy at the schools my daughter has attended in our county. The officer's role isn't just physical security, although that is part of their role. They oversee all law enforcement issues that might come up at the school.
 
If somebody is determined to cause mayhem in a school, there's not a thing in the world that will completely prevent it. That includes metal detectors, armed security guards, and even armed teachers. This, like the TSA, is all "security theater." All you can do is have a fast police response to minimize the damage.

You can try to identify the "determined somebody" ahead of time, in effect "pushing out the perimeter." There's a lot more that can be done to monitor people with mental problems that might have violent tendencies. This, in fact, is what we've done with potential terrorists (good intelligence work), and that's the real reason why we haven't had many terrorist attacks since 9/11. OTOH, terrorists usually don't work alone (and thus can be infiltrated), while school shooters usually do.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top