What if one of the teachers had a gun? One of them had 3, and they were used to murder 20 children

[whopis01]

102. thank you as well

In response to your questions:

1) There harm isn't in the armed protection of the students - the harm is in the society/situation/whatever you want to call it that has led to the point where armed protection of students is necessary. I saw the earlier poster in the thread who claimed it was abusive to have children see a weapon around them (or something to that effect) - I don't agree with that. The problem didn't start with the arming of the teacher - it started long before that. My point is that the arming of the teacher doesn't make everything better. It can make things safer - but it doesn't fix the core problems.

2) I understand your point there. I think we certainly agree that you have to be pro-active about fixing this (or any other) problem. There is way too much declaring this or that and then not doing anything to follow up on it.

Interesting observation on access / usage / education of firearms in the past. I think that something that goes hand in hand with that is that today the views on firearms tend to be very extreme. From the people who think that they are entirely evil and should be banned, to the people who think that they are the first and best solution to any problem. They are both demonized and glorified - and not discussed rationally.

One thought I was having after my last post was the difference between this event and the typical criminal use of a gun. Criminals, for the most part, are acting rationally (at least in a sense). A bank robber is trying to get money - he isn't wanting to get hurt or get known by doing this. That means that you can use deterrence against him. So a visible armed guard (without taking any other action at all) will have some effect to deter that type of criminal behavior. However, in this latest tragedy - I don't believe deterrence would have any effect. An armed guard shooting and killing him would have stopped it - but I don't think anything short of that would have done much. So what (in my opinion) should be used as a deterrence and the last line of defense becomes the first step in preventing a tragedy. There is something that just doesn't sit well with me there. Again - not saying that the armed guard shouldn't have been there - chances are it would have helped - it just feels like there were a great many things, both small and large, that could have made a difference here.

Sometimes it just feels like we let the bad guys (be they criminals, mentally disturbed, terrorists, whatever) steer the boat way too much.

You are right about the glorification of these criminals. It is hard to imagine that this guy had any other goal than to become famous (infamous) for what he did. And he is being given exactly what he wanted.