Quote:
Originally Posted by charlygal
All this talk of school shootings and arming teacher and staff. Let's walk through this.
I'm a crazy school shooter. My goal is to kill many people. I don't care about my life as I know this can end in either of two ways: I kill myself or the police kill me. Sure, I'll flee if given the chance, but I accept that I probably won't make it out alive.
So, I enter the school, walk into the nearest classroom and unloaded with my automatic weapon. I kill 10 kids.
Now, the teacher, who is armed, has a first priority to make sure the kids are okay. He/she may get a few shots off. They may even take down the shooter.
The shooter is down, but so what? There are still 10 dead kids. The shooter had the jump on everyone at the school and still was able to inflict damage.
Every staff member in the school could have had a weapon but because the shooter will always have the jump, the shooter will always be able to kill people.
So what is the benefit of the armed staff? They may reduce the number killed but they cannot totally prevent the carnage.
Thoughts?
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Right off the bat, the first thought is that you don't *have* an automatic weapon- you most likely have neither the resources nor finances to obtain one. Automatic weapons, whether obtained legally or illegally, tend to be very expensive. The fact that you wrote something like this shows that you [currently] lack the appropriate knowledge and education to properly discuss the matter. This is not a slight or an insult, you simply do not have the necessary information...but that can be corrected if you wish to learn.
First lesson:
An automatic weapon, such as an assault weapon, machine gun or sub-machine gun fires continuously as long as the trigger is held down (until it runs out of cartridges).
A
semi-automatic weapon fires only *one* round when the trigger is pressed, and the trigger must be released and pressed again to fire each subsequent round.
Now, making the assumption that you are thinking of an AR-15, which is a semi-automatic rifle that can be extremely accurate (in skilled hands) and fine for hunting, you should not have been able to just walk into a school with one. Even the short-barreled carbine models are rather large and difficult to conceal (as compared to a pistol). *Someone* should have been present and able to observe you attempting to enter the school with it.
But, to continue on with the scenario, let's assume that you either gain entry unimpeded or you kill the door watcher and enter. If you should encounter any armed resistance who successfully stops you, even if you managed to kill *some* victims, is not fewer victims dead a *better* outcome than if you were not stopped at all and were free to continue killing until you ran out of ammo?
There are two factors to consider here- Risk Assessment, and Risk Management. You need to assess the risk, in other words, you need to determine the probability that a particular event may/might occur. The next step is risk management, in which having determined that an element of risk is present, you take steps designed to reduce the amount of risk present and mitigate damage. This process is practically the same as when you purchase insurance on your car, your house or your life- you assess the risk and you purchase a product, an 'insurance' policy, in order to reduce the damage to your wallet in the event of some sort of accident (or, in the case of life insurance, to provide your dependents with financial income to mitigate the loss of you as the wage-earner).
An ancillary calculation in this matter is that of the cost to manage the risk, balanced against the probability of the risk occurring and the anticipated damage. If you buy a brand-new automobile for $30,000, a full coverage comprehensive insurance policy purchased for $600 is reasonable and prudent in order to protect you from the loss if said vehicle is damaged or stolen, because if you took out a loan you would still be on the hook for the money owed- the bank/finance company doesn't care what happened to the car, they just know that they gave you $30G and they want it back.
On the other hand, if you buy a $500 beater car, you aren't going to buy a $600 insurance policy on it because it is cheaper to just buy another one if something happens to it. You're only going to buy liability insurance, so that in the event that you or someone else gets hurt there will be some money for medical expenses or to pay for the damage you cause to someone else's property if you are at fault.
The tricky question here, is, what price do you put on the life of a child? 10 children? 50 children?
How much is 'too much' to spend to [attempt to] protect them?
It is practically impossible to predict when and where some random nutter, in possession of *any* implement or device that can/could be used to cause harm, is going to strike; and just slightly less impossible to predict the odds of the event occurring at any given (and otherwise peaceful) location.
What steps do you take, and how much (taxpayer) money do you spend to mitigate a risk for which you can make no accurate prediction as to the likelihood of the event occurring?
Depriving the general population of any particular implement that 99.9999% of owners are responsible in their use of said implement in a knee-jerk reaction is not the answer. If one person out of 50 million uses a device in a bad way, is it really reasonable to deprive the other 49,999,999 people of it? Let's suppose that some drunken construction worker, PO'd because he's getting laid off after a new school construction project is voted down, 'borrows' a crane with a wrecking ball and drives it to the 'old' school and starts knocking it down, killing a few dozen kids and teachers before the cops can get there and drag him off. Is it reasonable to outlaw cranes with wrecking balls because of it? Of course not, because the crane isn't responsible for the damage, the person operating it was, and the vast majority of crane owners use their cranes in the responsible and appropriate manner for the tools they are. "Oh, but this is different, this is an ugly black rifle that looks exactly the same as the one G.I. Joe goes to war with." No, it's the operator who is 'different', and who is responsible for the mayhem that *he* caused, not the other owners.
So, what steps do you take to mitigate this risk?
Arming [some of] the staff might not be such a bad idea, though it may be the least expensive of the options. But, I would not consider it to be the first line of defense, a good back-up plan, maybe.
My first line of defense would require some money spent to reconstruct a primary access point such that visitors would need to pass through staff office areas, a sort-of lobby with windows. There would be a staffed reception desk in the lobby. Further access to the interior of the school would require passing through not one, but two electronically locked doors in a series. The doors would be controlled by buttons at the reception desk, placed far enough away from the doors that a miscreant could not operate the buttons and pass through the doors himself (in the event of incapacitating the receptionist). The two interior doors would be spaced far enough apart that a miscreant could not hold both doors open at the same time in order to enable an accomplice to operate the buttons and then join the first, and the second door lock could not be released as long as the first door was open. A third switch would dead-bolt both doors, disabling the manual releases on the interior sides of the doors- cockroach gets in, but he can't get out. Windows would, of course, be bullet resistant.
The receptionist would also have an instant alarm button, like the hold-up alarms in banks and liquor stores.
This setup would prevent entry by one or two people, it would require a team of at least three and one would have to remain behind in the lobby, exposed to the [eventual] arrival of cops.
Another option is for the 'receptionist' to be armed (and trained), or could be placed in a separate secure cubby.
Of course, this only protects the primary access point. Other (secured) access points could potentially be exploited, but this would be another factor in the calculation of risk assessment and management, balanced against the costs of mitigating the [perceived] risks.
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