Just great! Another darned school shooting.

[chasfm11]

The idea of allowing teachers to carry inside the school has a few problems.

Who says they're going to start arming themselves even if they're allowed?

Many teachers, if not most, are very liberal, very left.

Yeah, there's a small percentage of conservative teachers, but there are probably a lot more public school teachers who're liberals that would rather eat glass than own a gun, never mind being proficient with one...

Then, the ones who are willing to carry will probably ask for combat pay.

Am I being negative?

Yes.

It is good to think about some of the down sides of the situation but there are also a number of upsides.

I, for one, believe that the gun free zones and their associated signs and advertizing are a magnet. Even if no one in the school were actually carrying, the idea that someone there COULD meet a shooter with lethal force is more likely to act as a deterrent than not. I buy into the theory that most of the mass shooters are cowards, looking for easy pickings. Actually, I believe that is true for a lot of criminals.

Today, schools are restricted and teachers who might otherwise get CHLs are less inclined to do so because they couldn't carry them as much of the rest of us. While you are correct that there are a lot of Liberals in the teaching ranks, there are also some hunters and gun sportsman. I believe that every extra gun, in the hands of a responsible CHL in the school environment is good.

When the free CHL classes were offered after Sandy Hook, teachers flocked to them. I would personally be willing to pay for a responsible teacher in my granddaugher's school to take the CHL class and receive the extra training that I would prefer that they have in the school environment. I believe that there is an interest level and there could be incentives added to make it even more attractive.

I had a disagreement with an ardent anti-gun Liberal who is a teacher. She went off on how she wouldn't be comfortable carrying a gun. My response: fine - don't YOU carry one. But don't try to put your personal situation on someone else who doesn't share it. "I don't want a gun" does not equal "nobody wants a gun" in my math.

I'm fine with combat pay. I'd be willing to lead a fund raising effort to raise the money for that combat pay so that it didn't come out of the taxpayer pocket, thus avoiding someone complaining about the use of their tax dollars. I'd approach gun related businesses and ask for donations with the idea of creating sponsors who received recognition and to whom those looking for guns and accessories to further the teacher CHL program could be sent.

For me, there are enough examples of ISDs that are already more firearm friendly. This is not another "third rail" in the political landscape where opponents can stake a claim unchallenged any more. If we had local control of our schools and the Constitution busting Federal Department of Education wasn't driving their agenda, I believe that we would have solved this problem locally along time ago.

I'm ready to take on the Liberal teaching establishment on all levels. I hate Common Core. I hate the Liberal bias in the textbooks and lesson plans and I'm ready to challenge each and every example of it that I can find. I'm tired of us rolling over and playing dead, thinking that there is nothing that we can do. We can do a lot. We just need to start doing it.

[4copas]

Possitive: The libs will have no part of it and find another career. What does that leave us with to fill positions? Maybe the conservative ones that ARE willing. Leaving the others spitting glass. Just looking on the possitive side.

[texanjoker]

The idea of allowing teachers to carry inside the school has a few problems.

Who says they're going to start arming themselves even if they're allowed?

Many teachers, if not most, are very liberal, very left.

Yeah, there's a small percentage of conservative teachers, but there are probably a lot more public school teachers who're liberals that would rather eat glass than own a gun, never mind being proficient with one...

Then, the ones who are willing to carry will probably ask for combat pay.

Am I being negative?

Yes.

From what my kids tell me, most teachers would scare me with guns.

[A-R]

Allowing teachers (or any law abiding citizen for that matter) to carry guns in any facility is not a one-size-fits-all solution to any type of crime.

But it IS an important part of a comprehensive solution (along with hardening the target with security measures and armed security officers) AND the proper/Constitutional decision.

Frankly, I'd support a law that states every gun-free zone must by law have 1 (per 500 disarmed people or 20,000 square feet of space) fully certified, fully trained, fully armed law enforcement officer or armed top-flight private security officer (with qualifications rivaling the best politician body guards) paid for directly from the general budget of that facility (no Federal subsidies - you want to maintain your local anti-gun nirvana, then YOU pay for it out of YOUR local funds).

[texanjoker]

I agree with guns in the gun free zones if people have the proper training.

[chasfm11]

The idea of allowing teachers to carry inside the school has a few problems.

Who says they're going to start arming themselves even if they're allowed?

Many teachers, if not most, are very liberal, very left.

Yeah, there's a small percentage of conservative teachers, but there are probably a lot more public school teachers who're liberals that would rather eat glass than own a gun, never mind being proficient with one...

Then, the ones who are willing to carry will probably ask for combat pay.

Am I being negative?

Yes.

From what my kids tell me, most teachers would scare me with guns.

Then perhaps it is time for some new teachers. I believe that teachers should be a cross section of society. If that is true, there will be some percentage, perhaps a small one, of those who frequent this forum. If, on the other hand, the teachers in an area have been hand picked to be the type that would scare you about guns, they likely have a variety of other scary characteristics and should not represent a large percentage of the teaching pool.

I've spoken directly to our granddaughter's teacher. I would be very comfortable with both she and the teacher from last year carrying a gun into the classroom.

I really, really like A-R's proposed law where every gun free zone would have to have a hired, paid professional with a gun. Perhaps that would start helping to balance the tendency to create alternate realities in the teaching profession to turn loose on our kids.

I went to and taught in schools in PA. There, a good percentage of the teachers outside of the major metropolitan areas were gun enthusiasts. If we aren't doing something similar in Texas, we are doing something wrong.

[VMI77]

Devils advocate:
So if I'm a moderate / centrist / person that really doesn't feel strongly about the 2nd amendment, which of the two solutions is more likely to have prevented this issue:
1) Removing the "gun free zone" status of public schools
2) Taking all the guns out of the USA so kids can't get them easily

I'm suggesting that we come up with something else other than blaming the liberals...

Colorado has had an awful recent history of incidents like this.. We need to do what we can as a group to be sympathetic, supportive, and come up with productive solutions otherwise the centrist moms and dads will start to think that removing all guns might solve the problem. The more this kind of stuff happens, the bigger fight we've got.

They can't escape the blame on this one given the fact that the shooter is a self-avowed communist, and anti-gun to boot.

[cb1000rider]

Liberal, communist, socialist - which one of those philosophies advocates the shooting of teachers at school? Give me a bad guy, I can find an association. You may not like the philosophy, but crazy is as crazy does and political leanings are out the door at that point.

I don't have a huge objection to having teachers with firearms. However, when I was a senior in high school, I was more than capable of taking away a firearm from most if not all of my teachers. It's going to result in perhaps "jusitified" uses of force against unarmed students the student acted to to justify it.. And it may give opportunities for students that don't have easy access a way to get a firearm. Course, that's conjecture, but that's the possible down side in my mind.

I thank our Creator each day, that so far there was no terrorist attack on a school or educational institution like what happened in Russia. After said incident, I still cannot believe the lack of armed security and security measures at virtually all educational institutions.
Terrorists, it seems, are more sane than a wannabe tough Joe schmoe, of no-mama and no-papa of America.

Beiruty,
Look at our implementation of "armed security" at airports. Again, maybe this is a possible solution, but the way our government does it - and at the cost at which they do it - there are simply much better ways to save lives per dollar. Course, I'm being overly practical an analytical.. The last thing I want to see is the education version of the TSA.

[chasfm11]

Liberal, communist, socialist - which one of those philosophies advocates the shooting of teachers at school? Give me a bad guy, I can find an association. You may not like the philosophy, but crazy is as crazy does and political leanings are out the door at that point.

I don't have a huge objection to having teachers with firearms. However, when I was a senior in high school, I was more than capable of taking away a firearm from most if not all of my teachers. It's going to result in perhaps "jusitified" uses of force against unarmed students the student acted to to justify it.. And it may give opportunities for students that don't have easy access a way to get a firearm. Course, that's conjecture, but that's the possible down side in my mind.

I thank our Creator each day, that so far there was no terrorist attack on a school or educational institution like what happened in Russia. After said incident, I still cannot believe the lack of armed security and security measures at virtually all educational institutions.
Terrorists, it seems, are more sane than a wannabe tough Joe schmoe, of no-mama and no-papa of America.

Beiruty,
Look at our implementation of "armed security" at airports. Again, maybe this is a possible solution, but the way our government does it - and at the cost at which they do it - there are simply much better ways to save lives per dollar. Course, I'm being overly practical an analytical.. The last thing I want to see is the education version of the TSA.

Concealed is concealed. Students in the school should have no better access to firearms carried by a CHL/teacher in the school than they would if that same teacher walked through Wal-Mart today. Perhaps some stories out of the schools were it is permitted today would confirm that it isn't an issue.

I know that it may not be a shared opinion but any student who is willing to try to take a gun away from a teacher or anyone deserves to be serving time. Thuggery has grown in our schools and it needs to be thwarted through prompt action against the student(s) involved. Instead, the schools seem bent on punishing kids on "zero tolerance" for just about anything else.

School security - in fact all education related matters - should remain local decisions. There is no way that I want the Federal government in school security any more than I want them pushing Common Core.

[The Annoyed Man]

Devils advocate:
So if I'm a moderate / centrist / person that really doesn't feel strongly about the 2nd amendment, which of the two solutions is more likely to have prevented this issue:
1) Removing the "gun free zone" status of public schools
2) Taking all the guns out of the USA so kids can't get them easily

I'm suggesting that we come up with something else other than blaming the liberals...

Colorado has had an awful recent history of incidents like this.. We need to do what we can as a group to be sympathetic, supportive, and come up with productive solutions otherwise the centrist moms and dads will start to think that removing all guns might solve the problem. The more this kind of stuff happens, the bigger fight we've got.

I want to carefully distinguish between "classical liberalism", which is more like modern libertarianism, and "modern liberalism", which is more like statist fascism. Whenever I say "liberal" below, I am referring to the latter:

It is what liberals have done to the culture over the past 100 years that produces these incidents. For the most part, those metropolises with liberal governments ALSO happen to be the cities with the nation's highest murder rates by firearm. THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE. This is a direct consequence of liberal policies, liberal thinking, and liberal government. Don't believe me? I submit Detroit, Chicago, and DC. Case closed. When those same liberals get hoist by their own petard, they move out of the cities and out to places like Colorado and Vermont (and Texas), where they pollute the local politics with their same sociopolitical poison which resulted in the degradation of the cities which they left. Colorado wasn't always full of hippies. It used to be a consistently right of center state, with a strong tradition of independent thought and a profound respect for the 2nd Amendment. Liberals trashed New York and other places, and then moved to Colorado to escape the consequences of their own policies. The problem is, they brought their policies with them because, at its heart, modern liberalism is an infantile state which, when dragged into physical adulthood can easily be characterized as a psychological deficiency. They are childish thinkers whose thought processes reside in the emotional, not in the logical.

They can't be convinced until their own fecklessness and failures of logic cost them catastrophically in a personal way; hence the bromide that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. They hate guns, until someone armed with guns—in defiance of all laws and morality—invades their homes, pistol whips them, and rapes their wives and daughters. Only THEN, when none of their fellow travelers are looking, do they sneak down to the gun store and buy a .38 or a Glock 19. Then later, after they can no longer reconcile their thinking with their actions, and they come to the conclusion that they have to abandon one or the other in order to shed the cognitive dissonance, they choose to turn in their guns at a local gun buy-back, nominally in the name of assuaging their consciences, but in reality so that they don't have to give up their infantile state and become fully self-realized adults.............because being an adult is too damned hard for them, and being assimilated into the socialist borg is just easier than resisting.

If you cannot win an argument with a liberal based exclusively on facts, and minus the emotional content, then they cannot ever be converted to adulthood no matter what you say, and just like with any badly-behaved child, I no longer care if their feelings are hurt, so long as their feelings don't do any more damage to my civil liberties.

Period.

[mojo84]

CB,
Taking the political bent and ideology out of it and boiling it down too basic common sense and practicality. How success do you think the country would be at ridding the country of ALL guns? A War on Guns would be no more effective than the war on drugs, prohibition, the war on poverty and any other war on a social issue.

Now back to the political aspect. The only thing "eliminating" guns would accomplish would be trampling on the rights of citizens and weakening the populace to the point of easily implemented tyranny and management of the subjects.

Wish I was as eloquent as TAM at expressing my opinions but I think you get my point.

[03Lightningrocks]

..."Abraham Snip".....

I'm suggesting that we come up with something else other than blaming the liberals...

..."Abraham Snip"....

I want to carefully distinguish between "classical liberalism", which is more like modern libertarianism, and "modern liberalism", which is more like statist fascism. Whenever I say "liberal" below, I am referring to the latter:

It is what liberals have done to the culture over the past 100 years that produces these incidents. For the most part, those metropolises with liberal governments ALSO happen to be the cities with the nation's highest murder rates by firearm. THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE. This is a direct consequence of liberal policies, liberal thinking, and liberal government. Don't believe me? I submit Detroit, Chicago, and DC. Case closed. When those same liberals get hoist by their own petard, they move out of the cities and out to places like Colorado and Vermont (and Texas), where they pollute the local politics with their same sociopolitical poison which resulted in the degradation of the cities which they left. Colorado wasn't always full of hippies. It used to be a consistently right of center state, with a strong tradition of independent thought and a profound respect for the 2nd Amendment. Liberals trashed New York and other places, and then moved to Colorado to escape the consequences of their own policies. The problem is, they brought their policies with them because, at its heart, modern liberalism is an infantile state which, when dragged into physical adulthood can easily be characterized as a psychological deficiency. They are childish thinkers whose thought processes reside in the emotional, not in the logical.

They can't be convinced until their own fecklessness and failures of logic cost them catastrophically in a personal way; hence the bromide that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. They hate guns, until someone armed with guns—in defiance of all laws and morality—invades their homes, pistol whips them, and rapes their wives and daughters. Only THEN, when none of their fellow travelers are looking, do they sneak down to the gun store and buy a .38 or a Glock 19. Then later, after they can no longer reconcile their thinking with their actions, and they come to the conclusion that they have to abandon one or the other in order to shed the cognitive dissonance, they choose to turn in their guns at a local gun buy-back, nominally in the name of assuaging their consciences, but in reality so that they don't have to give up their infantile state and become fully self-realized adults.............because being an adult is too damned hard for them, and being assimilated into the socialist borg is just easier than resisting.

If you cannot win an argument with a liberal based exclusively on facts, and minus the emotional content, then they cannot ever be converted to adulthood no matter what you say, and just like with any badly-behaved child, I no longer care if their feelings are hurt, so long as their feelings don't do any more damage to my civil liberties.

Period.

Can I get an Aman Brother??? Right on point!!!!

[cb1000rider]

CB,
Taking the political bent and ideology out of it and boiling it down too basic common sense and practicality. How success do you think the country would be at ridding the country of ALL guns? A War on Guns would be no more effective than the war on drugs, prohibition, the war on poverty and any other war on a social issue.

Mojo - first thanks for recognizing the scenario that I was describing - a US without guns (not that it's even a reasonable suggestion) - I didn't suggest a gun "ban". Even I know that banning guns would simply result in a massive black market and likely be about as effective as the war on drugs. I don't suggest it even as a "what if" because it won't happen and won't be effective.

I agree with you - removing all guns is basically impossible in the USA. But we can do "what if" via studying other countries that don't have the number of guns that we do.

Now back to the political aspect. The only thing "eliminating" guns would accomplish would be trampling on the rights of citizens and weakening the populace to the point of easily implemented tyranny and management of the subjects.

To be clear: I don't think that "eliminating" guns is warranted or reasonable.

I don't think I agree with you on what it would accomplish. Back when the 2nd amendment was put in place, it was possible to own the same type of military firepower as the military. Guys lined up and shot at each other. It's no longer possible to compete with military firepower. Even if we could own "military grade" weapons without massive background checks and license costs, an armed populace would last about 30 seconds against a modern government willing to take steps to put down a "revolution". Technology has changed things. The military can kill people (bad guys) in their homes halfway around the world without leaving an armchair. The military can watch you in your backyard. They can see you in your home. Why should a modern government fear any militia?

I don't think the government fears an armed public. I think the government fears a irritated public that might vote career politicians out of office and take away their lifestyles.

[VMI77]

Then perhaps it is time for some new teachers. I believe that teachers should be a cross section of society. If that is true, there will be some percentage, perhaps a small one, of those who frequent this forum. If, on the other hand, the teachers in an area have been hand picked to be the type that would scare you about guns, they likely have a variety of other scary characteristics and should not represent a large percentage of the teaching pool.

Maybe should be, but aren't. I highly doubt any profession represents a cross section of society. For one thing effective teaching requires a certain kind of personality and interest. For another, if a person is intelligent and has other options, teaching requires an unusual amount of dedication and willingness to forgo income. Liberals also dominate in some areas of government, particular social services, and in the media, whereas In my industry, there are very few "liberal" engineers, though some particular kinds of engineering my tend to attract more liberals. Most of this is just do to self-selection and the types of people who are inclined to certain professions. I doubt, for instance, there are a lot of liberals wanting to grow up to be a SEAL.....or even just grow up, if they can't keep their onesies like Pajama Boy.

[The Annoyed Man]

I don't think I agree with you on what it would accomplish. Back when the 2nd amendment was put in place, it was possible to own the same type of military firepower as the military. Guys lined up and shot at each other. It's no longer possible to compete with military firepower. Even if we could own "military grade" weapons without massive background checks and license costs, an armed populace would last about 30 seconds against a modern government willing to take steps to put down a "revolution". Technology has changed things. The military can kill people (bad guys) in their homes halfway around the world without leaving an armchair. The military can watch you in your backyard. They can see you in your home. Why should a modern government fear any militia?

I don't think the government fears an armed public. I think the government fears a irritated public that might vote career politicians out of office and take away their lifestyles.

(I want to make it plain that this is not advocacy on my part. I am merely pointing out some strategic and tactical issues that the American military would find almost impossible to overcome in any such effort to disarm the populace.)

I'll use Afghanistan as a current, and Iraq as a recent, valid comparison to demonstrate my next points.......

The strategic/tactical validity of using remote force projection as anything but an adjunct to traditional land/air/sea combat:
When we had 130,000+ troops in Afghanistan (plus the Brits and other militaries), of which only a small minority were engaged in remote projections of force through the use of airborne drones, etc., we were actually "winning the peace" there. We had actually successfully beaten back a pretty virulent insurgency and were gaining the trust of the populace. We had the same experience in Iraq. We surged and implemented COIN strategies, and things settled down. In both cases, the violence has since increased in direct proportion to our disengagement of American ground troops in both theaters, as we rely more and more heavily on remote force projections through the use of drones, satellite imagery, etc., etc. Yes, with a drone you can spy on an individual or small group, and take them out with a hellfire missile, but you cannot take out an entire movement that way. The Taliban is proving my point in Afghanistan at this very moment as I type this. I repeat, this is not advocacy....I don't give a damn what happens to foreign people who lack the courage or motivation to throw off oppressors, when the oppressors are not significantly better armed than the people.....I am merely stating the obvious.

Now, fast forward to a hypothetical future America where government is trying to put down a revolution and disarm The People. Who would build the drones, once they started being used against the friends and families of people employed at General Atomics (the builders of the Predator drone)? I'll bet that half or more of those people would quit their jobs. How long before a militia succeeded in finding a way to sabotage the factory? Aircraft have a shelf life. When the attrition rate exceeds the manufacturing rate, you stop having enough of them to be effective.

The strategic/tactical validity of using traditional assets and personnel to suppress The People:
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the ones who are currently winning live among the people over whom they are gaining control. DC politicians consider themselves too good to live among the people they govern, they are therefore disconnected from them in a way that would be fatal to their policies in these circumstances. What about conventional air assets? Anybody seriously think that most fighter jocks would follow orders to attack their own families on the ground? Anybody seriously think that a B-52 jockey would follow orders to carpet bomb Denton, or Houston, or Brownsville, when it is THEIR own families on the ground?

What about "boots on the ground" troops. What percentage of them would actually follow orders to massacre civilians who resisted disarmament?

Who exactly ARE these people who enlist in our military? They are the ones who swear an oath which begins with "I, ________, solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same," BEFORE they swear to obey the commands of the president, etc., etc. They are the sons and daughters of, for the most part, right of center families. They are, perhaps not exclusively, but overwhelmingly from the same tribe of people they would be commanded to suppress. They won't do it.

Let's localize this to Texas. Our state (plus Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana) contributes a higher percentage of its youth to the military than any of other states in the union.


To put it another way, the states which would attempt to direct such an operation are vastly UNDER-represented in the military:


SOURCE: http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... d-officers

Other relevant military demographics:







Believe me, military planners are as aware of all of this as is any southern "gun-nut" (guilty as charged). Why on earth is it so important for NSA to spy on us NOW? You want chilling? Watch ALL of this video:
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA[/youtube]

Does anyone seriously think that troops born and raised in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, etc., will obey orders to disarm Texans, Oklahomans, Arkansans, or Louisianans? What are they going to do.....send the New York National Guard to subdue Texas? It would be a blood bath, and nobody in the NYNG would ever see home again.

No. There is only ONE way that an American government could successfully disarm the populace by force, and that would be to import foreign troops to do the job. On THAT day, POTUS, VPOTUS, and anybody else involved in that chain of command is in violation of the Constitution, and the U.S. military is not only no longer constrained to obey their orders, but in all likelihood would join in the resistance to what amounts to a foreign invasion. There would necessarily be a few zealots who follow unlawful orders, but they would be a small minority of the total, and their long term fate would be by no means secure.

Any remote projection of force through unmanned technologies is ultimately doomed to failure unless it used as an adjunct to a very robust traditional force presence. THAT is why I do not believe that any federal attempt to force the disarmament of the American population would ultimately fail; and that is why the far bigger threat consists of the traitors (and they ARE traitors, no matter whatever semantics one chooses to use to avoid that stain) on the left who consistently and insistently chip away at the RKBA.

CB, you posed a question previously about whether or not we can convert liberals to the cause, and I gave an answer as to why we can't. THIS answer is why I am not worried about their whining or hurting their feelings. Those liberals who cannot be converted and who continue to chip away at my civil rights ARE traitors. I don't care if I offend them with my logic. The truth SHOULD hurt, if one spends one's efforts in trying to subvert it.