Zymunn wrote:
Found where I was going with this and put it together wrong. If teachers had guns in class the moment they snapped just makes it that much easier. Even by revoking the ban on guns on school property.
That's a valid concern. But that's easily enough solved by the
school district setting policy regarding that situation. I don't envision teachers having firearms on them while actually in a classroom teaching students. Not because I think teachers snapping and shooting their students is likely to occur at anywhere near the rate that mass shooters would do so, but because it would be far more likely for an unruly student to go for the gun and shoot someone.
Allowing faculty to have firearms on campus but not when not actively teaching class or otherwise interacting with students would be easy to do and relatively safe. They could be kept in various secure rooms (which there are a lot of on school campuses) out of reach of students, but potentially accessible in case of need. Point being that the specifics of how a school wants to handle this can be left to the school. But right now, it can't.
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Speaking of which, what state passed that guns can be carried on school grounds? Saw this one on fb from some gun-ho, arm the country "friend" of mine.
None. Well, some may have their own legislation, but the
Gun Free School Zones Act is the federal law which imposes this restriction. So the states have no choice. The schools have no choice. It's a terrible and misguided law IMO. It basically takes the choice of how to manage gun violence in schools out of the hands of the states and into the hands of a federal government which seems more intent on bowing to misinformed knee jerk public reaction than to actually crafting laws that work.
What's really strange about the law is that actual mass shootings at schools had been on the decline for some time. The problem with guns in school was mostly gang related and involved specifically targeted people who happened to be at school, not random killings with the school being the chosen area (and to be fair most school shootings in the history of the US were of this nature). It was really only *after* the law was passed that we started seeing a noticeable uptick in the random target style mass shootings on school grounds. The law was presumably intended to allow police officers the ability to find and arrest people loitering around schools with guns (mostly dealing with gangs in the area), but it's of questionable value IMO. Sure, if adult gang members were menacing kids and carrying weapons that were otherwise legal (lots of states allow you to transport a firearm in a car without needing a special permit) I suppose you could keep them out. But that requires a specific effort on the part of police to spot potential violators and search them.
It just seems like by implementing a relatively weak solution to one problem, they created a much bigger one. Instead of allowing cities with problems with gangs in and around their schools to come up with their own solution, the federal government decided to implement a one-size-fits-all solution and force everyone to comply with it. But a solution that maybe makes sense in one area may not make any sense at all in another. Which is precisely the problem when you try to do things at the federal level.
