Armed Guards? I picked up my nephew at his high school today, [View all]

[MineralMan]

to give him a ride home. I do that every day, since his working mom left his moron father. The Newtown shootings had me watching the school closely as it let out and I waited for my nephew. He got in the car, and we left the campus, very slowly, since lots of people were picking up their kids and the kids were leaving the parking lot. As we left, going out a back road, I saw a local police car parked in a space with two cops sitting in it. So, I asked my nephew if that was new.

He said that there were four cops every day at the school, all day. I asked if they were armed, and he said they were. I asked what they did at the school. He said that they mostly harass the students about stuff. Which students? The black kids, he said. They were always stopping them in the halls and questioning them about drugs and stuff. So I asked if there were a lot of problems at his school, fights, drugs, etc. He said not really.

What struck me most was that the two cops were just sitting in their patrol car on a side road, away from the mass of kids getting out of school. Had anything happened, they'd have taken a long time to get to the scene on foot. They couldn't drive, because the area is gridlocked for about 15-20 minutes after school lets out.

It's a large high school in a suburb of St. Paul, MN. I'd guess, from looking at the kids streaming out of the school, that there are a couple of thousand students attending.

Armed guards at this school would be completely helpless if someone decided to shoot up the school as it was letting out for the day. If you can imagine a couple thousand teenagers streaming out of the building into the parking lots, and all the cars jamming the campus roads, you can see that there's no way four cops could do much, especially if they're sitting in a squad car blocked by the traffic. Dozens and dozens of cars come to pick up kids, and nobody pays any attention to cars arriving and leaving. About 20 buses also contribute to the daily traffic jam.

Armed guards aren't the solution. Eliminating the firearms that can wreak mass havoc is the solution. Armed guards couldn't do anything to stop a massacre at that school if it happened when school was letting out.