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Yosemite under Orion's gaze

Saturday, April 1, 2023

guns and schools

Conservatives have claimed for years that the only solution to the rash of school shootings is to arm teachers. Trump said this in 2018, Boebert said it recently and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie said just last week that there has never been a school shooting in a school where teachers were armed.

It turns out that he is wrong.

911 calls show that at least two staff members were carrying in the Nashville Christian school shooting this week that killed six people.

A woman who called 911 while hiding under a desk during the shooting said to the dispatcher that one or two staff members carry guns, reported The Tennessean.

The revelation came as officials on Thursday released two dozen 911 calls and recordings of emergency dispatches from the shooting.

The call informing the 911 dispatcher that some staff members were armed was made at 10:12:05am on Monday.

A woman who called from the office of the nursery said: “We do have a school person, or two ... I’m not sure ... who would be packing, whose job it is for security. We don’t have security guards, but we have staff.”

It didn't work. And it didn't work in El Paso, where a flotilla of people of officers stood outside with guns while the shooter went on their rampage.

I am not anti gun but I think the assault style weapons have to go. And so do the tired notions that the horrific shootings will be stopped by introducing more guns into schools. The person on offense always has a major advantage in these situations. Everyone else is reacting and it is almost always too late. We need to remove the military style weapons that do the most damage. It won't be a total cure but I think it will go a long way.

1 comment:

Jon Harwood said...

In this climate I don't object to armed teachers, but armed teachers need valid combat training. Taking on an aggressor armed with a semiautomatic combat rifle in a school full of children is not the same problem as taking on a drunk with a pistol in a mini mart. The police pattern is to aggressively confront the attacker and doing this properly requires having the muscle memory from real training.

I doubt the politicians advocating arming teachers are willing to make the money commitment to make them "soldiers".

Otherwise you get the results of the latest incident. The guns were there but the motivation and skill to risk death to use them correctly is not.