You missed the entire point of my post. You’d have a point if every single school and daycare statistically had an even chance of such an attack in any given year.

Seems like that’s an argument for doing nothing. If somebody is upset their kid was shot in school, just console them by telling them their child’s death is a rare event and it’s the price we pay because allowing schools the means to defend their children is just too risky. I can’t wait to see the press releases on that.

I don’t believe that’s true, and the statistics don’t back you up. There are millions of defensive gun usages every year according to surveys by the (hardly pro-gun) government. Gun accidents are a vanishingly small factor in American life, and children injured or killed due to gun accidents in homes that have them are even smaller. Schools can certainly have training and storage requirements for teachers who want to carry, but a blanket everybody-is-incapable gun ban is simply brain-dead political correctness taken to ridiculous extremes and an open invitation to maniacs.

As I said, and a point you also missed: if your point were true, armed police officers would be more of a risk than an aid, since their accident rate would outweigh their utility in preventing crimes. After all, you yourself don’t have a better than even chance of being the victim of a crime in any one year, either. (If you do, you should move to a better neighborhood, quick.)

So you believe that if you had to carry a gun you would kill someone every 3 years or so from having a bad day or gross stupidity.

Slowburn on December 15, 2012 at 5:50 PM

I wrote no such thing. I presumed, for argument’s sake, that once in 100 years there would be an incident with a gun carried by a guard or faculty at a given school, and that 1 in 10 of those incidences would result in one death on average. Or, every 1000 years of a person carrying a gun in a school there would be one death as a result. I think that is pretty generous. How did you get one every three years?

One death in 1000 years at a given school, if it saved a Columbine from happening, seems like a good deal. But there is only a one in a million chance of a Columbine happening at any given school in any given year, meaning the risk from allowing just one person to carry a gun is greater than the risk of a mass shooting, at any given school. Do you get it now?

All it takes is for the perp to figure out that there’s no need to smuggle a firearm into a school, and you’ve got your liability issue. One kid distracts the guard, the other cold cocks him from behind. They take the gun to class. One stands outside while the otehr empties the clip. Or there’s a gun cabinet/safe, as another poster suggets. You think students can’t find its location and break into it? Maybe not this year but how about next? How many faculty will have kids going to the same school where they teach, who might figure out a way to get the access code from the parent? What if this Adam guy had tortured and killed his Mom at home TO GET THE ACCESS CODE, walked into the school (hey, that’s Mrs So-N-So’s kid – Hi kid!), got into the safe and accessed weapons that way?

Nobody can guarantee what will happen in the future, especially gun-banning politicians. Almost certainly an armed teacher could not have stopped the shooting before he began, but almost certainly an armed teacher could have responded before 27 people were shot.

Socratease on December 15, 2012 at 5:35 PM

You missed the entire point of my post. You’d have a point if every single school and daycare statistically had an even chance of such an attack in any given year. But each one has only about a one in one million chance of a Connecticut-style shooting each year. I think the chances of a death from a gun carried by someone invited into a school is greater than that of a gun held by an assailant. If we were having a civil war, and such attacks happened daily, that would be a different story.

shuzilla on December 15, 2012 at 4:57 PM

So you believe that if you had to carry a gun you would kill someone every 3 years or so from having a bad day or gross stupidity.

And there’s no guarantee that arming a person would stop a shooter from killing anyone.

Nobody can guarantee what will happen in the future, especially gun-banning politicians. Almost certainly an armed teacher could not have stopped the shooting before he began, but almost certainly an armed teacher could have responded before 27 people were shot. Remember that the initial shots against the Principal were broadcast over the PA system, there was ample warning that something was going on.

Could an armed teacher have a bad day and lose their gun? Yes, they could. If you had an armed police officer in the schools, they could (and have) done the same. Are you claiming police officers should therefore not be armed? It’s always a balance between advantage and disadvantage, just like gun restrictions have the disadvantage of leaving victims helpless.

But also don’t forget the advantage of random teachers being armed on the decisions these shooters make. They choose schools and churches and shopping malls because of their policies of gun-free zones to guarantee a safe environment for their slaughter. Take away that guarantee and you shift the calculation.

why couldn’t a security guard have stopped the killer??

Sachiko on December 15, 2012 at 3:25 PM

The shooter took out most of the top tier of the school management before moving on to the classes. Likely he would have dispatched an armed guard stationed at the gate as soon as he was let through.

While I salute the bravery of the teachers that tried to protect their students, they really had no chance in an environment where they were required by policy and law to be helpless. All the metal detectors and ID requirement in the world don’t help you if you have no counter-force to oppose an armed killer who manages to get past your first layer of passive defense.

Experts: Connecticut school could not have prevented shooting

Sure, the school couldn’t have prevented a shooting, but they certainly could have prevented the massacre. But political protocols prevented the district from including the one security protocol that would have prevented the massacre, which left their system “ensuring” nothing more than annoyance or disturbance prevention for the students and parents.