lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
The absolute truth is that had even one faculty member at Sandyhook had a firearm available to them on campus, there would have been fewer dead kids, possibly even no dead kids.
A best case scenario, maybe. Absolute truth?
Yeah. I misswrote that. Put the word "likely" in between "there" and "would". Funny how I've been careful to express this as a probability issue all along, but you both leaped on the one time I forgot to put a word to indicate that this wasn't a guaranteed outcome.
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Too many variables to pretend there is any certainty.
Of course. Again, I've said repeatedly that everything else being the same, the odds are that fewer kids will die if there are armed non-uniformed people in the area of a shooting than if there are not. Of course there's no guarantee. This is something I've clearly stated multiple times. You just choose to quote the one time I forgot to make this clear.
What is "certain", however, is that we have better odds of fewer kids being killed if we have armed faculty members than if we don't.
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For one, that one faculty member would have to be extremely close to where the shooting took place, with their weapon ready. Then you'd have to account for the shooter not knowing about said faculty member. It's a pretty big building, after all. Multiple entrances, low windows.
It's a grade school. Have you been to a grade school since you attended one? They're not that big. Might take all of 30 seconds to run from one end to the other in most cases. Maybe a minute depending on the layout.
This is also irrelevant. Any such armed faculty member will almost certainly be much closer than the police. Probably much much closer. Even if it takes that person 5 minutes to retrieve their gun and confront the shooter, that's about 1/4th the time it took the police to arrive in this case. How many fewer kids will die in that case? I don't know. But a simplistic statistical guess would be 3/4ths fewer. So instead of 20 dead kids, you'd have 5. That seems worthwhile, doesn't it?
And that's assuming an even distribution of killings. But we know that the shooter first killed the principle in her office, then shot more faculty in the halls while heading towards the classroom. Then he shot the teachers in the classroom. Then he started shooting the kids. It's quite possible in this case that an armed response within 5 minutes would have occurred before he took his first shot at any children at all.
As you say, there are many variables, but everything else being the same, quicker armed response is better. And the best way to ensure a quicker response (without the ridiculous expense of paying armed guards to stand around every area of every school in America) is if faculty can be armed. Again, I'm not saying we should require this at all. I'm just saying that we should remove the current laws which prohibit this.
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Frankly, one mook pretending to be Dirty Harry most likely wouldn't have made much of a difference at all.
Most likely? Even if there was just a 5% chance of saving the life of one child, isn't that still worth it? What do we gain by prohibiting faculty (anyone really) from having guns in a school zone? There's zero cost here. Even if there's just a small gain, it's worth doing.
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That's as dumb as thinking that the shooter would have gone after the over glorified armed mall cop instead of just going in and doing what he did.
If there had been an armed security guard standing at the entryway of the school, you can bet that the shooter would have simply shot him first. Again, lots of variables here, but while most of these shooters may be insane, they are typically not stupid. Most mass shootings are well planned, well ahead of time. Remember that we need to deal not just with this last shooting, but with the next one. We need to look at what will do the most good in the most number of cases with the least amount of cost and infringement of our rights. Simply removing the prohibitions in place regarding guns in school zones is more or less free and gains us at least some increased chance of reducing the number of fatalities in a shooting.
To me, that makes it a good decision. Sadly, it likely will not even be considered because one side of our gun control debate has lost sight of the objective (reduce crime and killing) and substituted it with their assumed solution (get rid of guns). So they can't allow any solution which actually reduces restrictions on guns, even if it quite clearly would reduce the number of deaths in these types of shootings. The cause has lost its way.
Edited, Jan 16th 2013 4:09pm by gbaji