Three kids killed by shooter at Christian school

According to police the best weapon for home defense is a shotgun, but unless you live the lower East side of Chicago who needs one for that reason.

I can accept someone saying they own a shotgun and rifle for hunting, shooting skeet, or going to a range to fire off a few rounds for fun. But for home protection doesn’t carry as much weight.

 

Most schools fenced in, uniforms, etc.....huh? I've been in many dozens, not one matches that description.

School property is typically wide open, approachable from many roads and essentially infinite footpaths. Even "walls" are generally on high-traffic roads to block noise and provide the simplest of barriers to hopefully keep kids and cars from running into each other's paths. Getting over/through them is a simple task. Most schools have a door on every exterior wall per every couple of rooms. Which is only sensible since in only a couple of rooms you are going to have upwards of 80 people in most cases. You can't bottleneck thousands of people. In addition to the shooting range assistance that would be, it is also now a recipe for tragedy from every emergency situation imaginable.

Most schools will "require" people to enter in specific doors, but that is an uninformed outsider's solution. Every door is opened from the inside, and kids open them all day every day. Adam Lanza came right through the "required" door anyway. I have three doors to the outside within 30 second walks. This building has 18 numbered doors, and a few "unmarked" doors.

I personally would indeed be in favor of restricted vehicle entrances, with security checks there. Most maniacs drive their weapons in. But that is also on the weakest level of action, since talking your way through would likely be pretty easy, maniacs can just shoot through that also, and it would be about a week before the first group of parents complained about the existential threat to existence this inconvenience would cause. Ramos shot his grandmother in the head, she called the police, he stole her vehicle, crashed it across the street, and still made it into the building. Not sure what more a person could do to NOT make it into a school loaded for a whole mountain of bear. It was half an hour of mayhem before he even got to the building. And then of course we know what happened once he was there. A whole school of LEO scared to actually do the shootout for over an hour.

The other problem here is rational people solutions for irrational actors. All of these extra guns in schools won't deter these people. They are not operating on the same thought plane as everyone else now. They have already committed to death. They have been plotting to kill children for months. They shoot their grandmothers and parents beforehand. Basically that solution is a multi-person shootout in classrooms, with one of the shooters being NOT a maniacal killer of family and children. In fact, maybe the exact opposite. Someone who has an uncommon joy for humanity. Many teachers are simply not going to kill people, even crazy ones. I hope that it is not too complex to understand. At this point, failure has already occurred. You are now in desperation mitigation mode. All that is left is final body count and lifetime trauma for whoever gets through it.

You walk through most neighborhoods and it won't be long until you run into an absolute nimrod that you hope to never have any meaningful interaction with that might impose some actual albeit absorbable real-life cost on you. Financial, emotional, property, etc. Lots of people trained to do specific tasks in life suck at them, have no desire to do them well, or are actively seeking to rip you off somehow. It isn't difficult to find just a straight up madman, they're all over. And yet there is an absurd insistence that the default stance is that each and every one of these people should face essentially no barrier in obtaining weapons that can kills hundreds in minutes. The tiniest of requirements -- rubber stamped "background checks" that amount to "Has this person already shot up a school or church? No -- SALE Yes -- 48 hour hold for further research."

The "mental health" blather is borderline complicit in the murders, IMO. Every politician who ever says it knows that it is meaningless and designed to maintain the status quo, which is oh well, send your kid to a public school and part of the punishment is that today might be that school's day in the barrel. One might suspect that the people who make suggestions that in fact guarantee these continued outcomes may not be just plain stupid, but perhaps are in on it. Ted Cruz is pretty dumb, I can't argue that. But is he really so stupid that he can't understand how pushing phony solutions is more than useless? Nah.

 

High capacity magazines provide a lot more cushion to inflict maximum casualties and embolden shooters. No one is saying shootings would stop entirely but it would make shooters hesitate if the know they'll have to reload after 6 shots or switch weapons.

 

too many irresponsible gun owners without proper training or gun security.

 

No one is debating that. The problem we run into is in this country it isn’t just the good and responsible people who are able to buy guns. The buy more guns than you can afford people don’t want any restrictions on gun ownership, or any responsibility for that ownership. Correct those things and I believe most people will be good with it.

Now before you start in about criminals getting guns illegally you need to ask where those guns come from. Mostly stolen from those good and responsible owners who weren’t as responsible as we thought. They also come from states with lax gun laws. Chicago has a gun problem because all bad guys have to do is drive across the border to Indiana.

 

That will not solve the problem. Best-case scenario it would help alleviate it, but even that is unlikely.

 

Nobody is saying it’s guns alone. We are just asking for some type of mitigation. I’ll ask you a question: let’s pretend your kid’s elementary school was going to be shot up by one of these terrorists and you got to choose between an AR-15 and a revolver for them to use which would you choose and why?

 

Not even cops.

So disarm them too?

 

The CDC had previously stated (before defensive gun use stats were removed due to gun control lobbying) that almost every major study pegs defensive gun uses at between 500k and 3 million per year. Many researchers feel even those numbers are under-reporting. If that is akin to sighting a unicorn, then being a victim of a violent crime committed with a gun (whether or not used) is also sighting a unicorn at about 800k per year. Your odds of getting killed by a gun are even lower than that, at somewhere around 20,000 per year.

Generally, defensive uses of firearms at a minimum offset any harm done by criminal use of firearms and at a maximum do so at a 3-4x clip.

Also, your tax, licensing, and insurance suggestions would disproportionately impact the poor, often minorities. These are often the people with the greatest need for firearms to protect themselves.

 

Okay, so they’re out there.

How do you suggest we regulate the ones on the black market?

In a country with hundreds of millions of guns, it’s essentially impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

 

In this country they don’t need a black market.

 

LOL, A for effort but most on here don't come at this logically...gotta ban something damn it!

 

They should be the first people disarmed if we are doing that

 

The more rounds, the lower the hit rate can be while still causing mass death quickly without a chance to react. I doubt that a 100% hit rate with a 6 round revolver is terribly likely.

In terms of legislation, I think proactive health monitoring should be necessary for gun ownership. A gun owner should have to go to a professional mental health evaluator regularly to look for signs of mental instability. It should not just be an opt-in situation, where if nobody reports the person, they are assumed to be mentally fit.

 

and that is where extensive background checks should come into play along with certified trainers with a professional responsibility to not pass people with the wrong temperament. lots of people in Europe own guns yet they don't have these problems. Perhaps we could learn something from their system of background checks and training requirements

 

I've seen this argument routinely made, and happy for someone to correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the overwhelming majority of these mass shootings are done with legally purchased weapons.

 

what is your suggestion? just accept it and move on?

 

thanks for posting the link. Shooter died too quickly. Would have rather she suffer for what she did.

 

Here’s a likely scenario if we allow open carry with current restrictions:

Shooter enters a school/mall/park and starts shooting.

Armed teacher/pedestrian responds by shooting back.

SWAT team enters and shoots shooter and citizen not knowing which one was the shooter.

 

I mean, logically, just what the hell are we supposed to do? If you outlawed the sale of firearms next week evil shits would still have the unscratchable urge to kill small children.