Maine candidate: Fire extinguishers 'great deterrent' for guns

[Igel]

21. It's not a horrible idea.

We act like the alternative is all hunky-dory. "Teacher doesn't have a gun, everything'll be fine." But Stoneman was the consequence.

Here's how lock-down drills go where I work.

1. Problem's claimed to be identified: Armed intruder, shots fired.
2. Teachers pull every kid near their room into their room. They make sure the door's locked and cover any windows into the classroom. Kill the lights. Try to bar the door in some way--put stuff in front of it, tie the handle so it's hard to open.
3. Wait quietly until the all-clear's sounded.

If (3) wasn't going to happen because it wasn't a drill, we'd wait until either the killer was killed someplace else or until he picked my room's door and tried to get through. I'm not sure my teens would stay quiet. If he doesn't get through, then we wait until the killer is killed someplace else.

If he does get through, then we're 30 or so people, one middle-aged unarmed male and around 30 teens, against a killer who'll come in when he's ready, shooting at will. Right now I'd be holding whatever it was I could use to try to club or hurt him. Perhaps a meter stick. Perhaps a bottle of whiteboard fluid. Perhaps I'd have pulled a desk draw out of my desk to use it as a club. No, all of these sound really, really lame.

Now, if I were armed (let's say for the sake of argument I qualifed, was allowed, and wanted to be) then I could be sitting there aiming at the one way he has of getting into my room. I'm already at risk, there's no increased risk during this actual encounter, and he's brought the fight to me.

But if I'm out in the hall anyway rounding up students, it wouldn't hurt to grab a fire extinguisher. He doesn't have to actually get that far through the door or close to me for me to be able to slow him down. Sure, he's shooting and now we've pissed him off. But really, he's already coming at us with a gun to kill us, so that's not really a downside. Once he's got vision and breathing problems, that heavy metal thing would make a great object to smash his face or skull with.
Now, let's say I'm not armed.

We insist on trying to say that during a lock-down drill teachers are going to pour out of their classrooms, leaving their kids undefended, in order to shoot the guy. That's not where the fight usually is. In every school shooting, kids are easy targets in the hall and outside, but those targets typically vanish real quick and sometimes those killed or wounded aren't that large a number. Then the gunman goes into classrooms, which have one entrance, are fairly open, and stuffed with terrified students, and that's where the serious killing typically happens.