Weirdness In The Wake of Sandy Hook Shootings (CNN, FBI, weapons)

[Cliffie]

OK, I was watching CNN at the diner and they were asking an FBI weapons specialist about what sense he saw in the gun lobby's statements that schools would be safer if staff had concealed carry permits. This guy started talking and went completely off the rails.

A) He said concealed carry permits would not be very helpful because men can simply hide their guns under their blazers or tucked into belts, while women have a much harder time carrying without a gun-shaped lump showing. And, not to be sexist he said, but most school staff are women. Guns locked in closets or desks inside a teacher's purse would be -- simultaneously -- too easy for the kids to find and misuse, AND too hard to get at and use on an assailant like Adam Lanza.

He seems to be implying here that it would be better for the armed assailant and Miss Crabtree, the art teacher, to get into a shootout in the hallway rather than simply keeps guys like this out of the building. Yeah, that's MUCH safer for the kids, dude.

B) He said that to be really good at using a gun you have to train at it for hundreds of hours, and the schools probably cannot afford that kind of training outlay.

This one sounds as if he were expecting someone to require whole school staffs to be packing heat. And for the school district to pay for it and keep the teachers' aim good enough for them to kill.

There are so many other thinhgs wrong with what this guy said that I get lost thinking about them all:

>> Probably more than a few of the staff HAVE these permits already, but that doesn't mean these people think it's a good idea to carry a loaded weapon into a school building. I think most responsible gun owners would cringe at the idea.

>> Would you require only tenured teachers to carry guns, or would the student teachers and custodians and bus drivers have them too? What about the hall monitors? The lunch ladies?

>> Is a public school really the best place to have a staff trained in SWAT procedure? The way the teachers handled the Columbine massacre and Paducah and so on -- gets the kids under cover, call 911, hustle everyone out of the building -- probably saved many more lives than they would have been able to if the teachers and principal faced down the assailants with their own guns. I shudder to think what would have happened if any of them had.

I think the fact that they would even bring up this question and discuss it seriously on the national news shows that Adam Lanza's terrorist goals have been met beyond the wildest dreams of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. After Columbine, kids started getting expelled for having bobby pins in their pockets and suspended until they could prove they were getting psychiatric attention if they were overheard talking about wanting to dust the recess-yard bully. Now they're talking about arming the school staff?

What does anyone think of this?

[camping!]

I can see where the *potential* of having staff carrying loaded weapons would be a deterrent. After all, school shooters are all cowards at heart. They deliberately go into an environment where they are the only person armed. If there was a possibility of one or more of the school staff being armed I do believe that an emo ***** wouldn't go through with a shooting.
That said, I don't know that this would be the answer.