A firearm question for you LeftiesFollow

Armed guards in every home!

Gbaji lives for making up hypotheticals and calling them absolutes. The number of "absolutely", "it's a fact", "without question" and like phrases he sprinkles into his posts is pretty funny. He's dead-set on pretending to be an authority on any topic and his means of trying to convey that is through use of those terms (within the spray of word-vomit, of course). Sort of like Gingrich's attempt to come across as sagely and professorial on a topic by meaningless usage of "fundamentally", "profoundly", "deeply", etc. It's a verbal/written tic to make up for an internal inadequacy.

Obviously it's not "absolute truth" that an armed adult would have led to less deaths. The adult could have been immediately killed or fired, missed and hit other children. The adult could have just choked and never drew a weapon at all. The shooter seemingly chose the location for an emotional attachment, not because he feared schools that might have a teacher with a pistol.

Edited, Jan 16th 2013 11:03am by Jophiel

Sounds suspect, I don't want some gun-wielding zombie chasing me down.

With as many sword-swinging zombies as I've met in forgotten ancient tombs I guess I just assumed they would simply grab the nearest weapon and attack relentlessly. I suppose it might be harder to pull a trigger as a zombie than simply hold a sword though. Since you need all those fine motor skills which some zombies seem to lack.

Not enough research devoted to undead dexterity issues; it's only going to come back to haunt us in the end.

I never saw any of the "...of the Dead" flicks after the second.

The first second, or the second second?

The original Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978).

I saw the first in a high school film studies class.

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.



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.



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.



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.



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

"Absolute" "Likely" same thing.

Just don't accuse him of backpedaling, cause that's not was it is, it was merely you misunderstanding what he meant.

Yes. I understand that most people have only a simplistic grasp of language, but that's a perfectly correct formulation. Absolute refers to truth. Likely refers to the odds of a given outcome.

It's like saying that it's absolutely true that a good diet and regular exercise will decrease your odds of getting heart disease. Does it guarantee that you wont? No. Does it guarantee that everyone who doesn't will? No. But everything else being the same, you're less likely to develop heart disease if you have a good diet and regular exercise than if you don't. That's an "absolute truth".


Of course, once again you'd prefer to argue semantics than the issue at hand. Are you arguing that we're worse off with regards to mass shootings by allowing faculty to bring firearms to the school if they wish? I would argue that we're worse off because we expressly prohibit faculty from having firearms while at the school (and have). How about actually arguing against my point instead of trying to find semantic errors? I know. Crazy thought!

You mean the semantic argument you started yourself when you tried to backpedal out from your absolute truth of how that lone gunman would have saved all those precious kids? Crazy indeed.

Could have saved all those kids. Likely would have saved some of them at the very least. The shooter did not stop shooting until the police arrived. And armed faculty members could have intervened far far faster. Is this even a matter for debate? Or do you guys argue against it because it just doesn't fit into the knee-jerk "guns are bad" assumption you have?


Sorry, but that's crazy.