someproteinguy wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Cost us nothing.
Still can't wrap my head around this part. There's no way this doesn't get caught up in miles of red tape and political drama.
Only because the same anti-gun folks will do everything they can to make it so.
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There's too many people that need to be convinced otherwise, and that's a lot of advertising dollars. There will be town halls, PTA meetings, counter-campaigns, protests. The legislation will get watered down. Even if the idea is approved you're going to have people panicking. The local school board will require additional gun safety courses, periodic mental health evaluations, firearm choice will be restricted requiring people to purchase only certain guns, etc.
Which is exactly the wrong thing for us to do. I get that there's this perception, mostly by non-gun owners, that all gun owners are these crazy folks yelling "yah-hooo!" and shooting up anything they can. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of gun owners take that ownership very seriously. They practice with their guns regularly. They maintain them. They learn about them. Most were taught proper gun handling as children. They don't see them as toys or things to treat lightly. All of those concerns are about folks assuming that a member of a school faculty will somehow magically be a greater danger to the students if he's got a gun. That's simply not true.
And frankly, it's a silly assumption. Sure, if you went in the strawman direction of paying money to put all the teachers through training and then requiring them to have access to some firearms on campus, then yeah, you'd have a bunch of scared people who don't know how to really handle guns, who will likely panic and do something stupid. But if you just allow folks who have already spend the time and effort and money to obtain a firearm on their own to bring it to the school (again, let's assume some reasonable means of securing it on site), then it's not a problem. Again, it's zero cost. And the same folks who'd be bringing guns to school would be the same people who already own guns anyway. If your concern is the faculty member deciding to commit violence with the gun, he has the ability to to that already.
I'm just not seeing a huge downside. A tiny increase in the chance someone who isn't supposed to have access to a gun manages to do so. Maybe. But any kid in the school likely has dozens of much easier ways of getting a firearm than finding some way into a secured area of campus, rummaging around inside randomly and then happening to stumble on where someone in the faculty has his gun, figuring out how to get to it (let's assume it's in a locked case), and then what? Shooting up the school? That seems pretty far fetched, versus some angry kid stealing one from his parents, or a relative, or a "friend", or buying on illegally on the street, or any of a dozen ways this could happen.
People don't just randomly stumble upon a gun and become deranged killers. And even a minor amount of intelligent securing (the same sort you're already required to do when transporting firearms in most states already), is more than sufficient to prevent plain old accidents. Again, I'm not seeing the downside here.
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It's probably cheaper to just hire a couple of additional police officers and have them stationed at the school during the day.
No, it's not. It's vastly more expensive. And, as I've pointed out repeatedly, less effective. Students know where the LEOs on campus are. And frankly, the primary purpose of those officers is to prevent your normal everyday mischief on campus. Make sure the kids aren't doing drugs openly in the quad or whatever. The point is that any kid planning an attack like this will make "wait until the cop goes on his lunch break, or is sitting in the guard room on the far side of the campus" as step one in his plan.
And to answer the previous question (cant remember who asked), yeah, the kids who do these shootings actually spend quite a bit of time planning them. They often obsess about every detail for months in advance before actually working themselves up to going through with it. So yeah, anything that might discourage them from doing so might be huge. We can't know for sure, but again, why not do this and find out?