someproteinguy wrote:
A trained person responding to a threat is certainly the ideal situation. It's what you'd want, if someone is going to confront a shooter in a school you want them to know what they're doing, have the best chance of success, and minimal change of causing more harm than good. Well for my money at least, if someone is going to be carrying a firearm on a campus they damn well better be trained.
Most people who obtain carry permits for firearms have some degree of training. It's usually required to get the permit. What I've been arguing all along is to remove the moronic restrictions which prohibit those who already have those permits from carrying their weapons in various areas. Specifically school zones.
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The issue is two-fold for me from that point:
1) Are there going to be people in place who are pre-trained to respond quickly with a firearm?
Who knows? I'm not talking about mandating anything. I'm talking about removing an existing restriction on firearm carry laws. The point is that right now, even if there are several members of a school faculty with the skills and training to deal with a shooter, they are hindered by the fact that they are required to leave their firearms off campus. We can talk about training people on campus as well, but how about we start by removing the law which currently ensures that even if such a trained person is on campus, they can't have their weapon with them?
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2) If so, who's paying for that training? If not, are we letting untrained people have guns? Or are we hiring security people? Or requiring training perhaps?
What I'm proposing costs no money at all. There are probably tens of thousands of people who work in schools right now who are sufficiently capable of intervening in a shooting incident who are currently disarmed and thus unable to do so as effectively as they could. This is a free resource which could help protect our children which we are throwing away. I'm just suggesting that we not do that.
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I imagine there may be cases where you can find no shortage of properly trained people who are willing to carry a firearm and protect their students, but I doubt that's going to be a universal situation.
Sure. But some is better than none, right? We currently have laws which actually prohibit those who do have the training and expertise from being able to effectively act in the event a school shooting occurs. To me that's crazy.
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Which is where my concern lies, which is why I'd wonder if using a military-trained person in an example is the most relevant case.
It's a case that shows us that had he not had to run so far to get to his gun, maybe more lives could have been saved. Obviously, we can't say exactly what would have happened, nor can we guaranteed outcomes in the future. But we can tilts the odds in favor of saving student lives, and I think that's worth doing given the nearly zero risk and cost this would entail.
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It's not going to be the universal situation, and how we'd address that is more of a concern than whether or not someone properly trained can respond appropriately.
I'm not sure why you think that. If we waited to do something until it could be done universally, we'd never do anything. Do you wait to install an alarm system in your home until all your neighbors can install them? No. You install yours in your home, and you let your neighbor worry about installing theirs in their home. Similarly, why should a school be forced to wait to be allowed to let their faculty bring weapons to school to help protect their students until there's some federal universal assurance that all schools will be able to do so? That seems strange to me. Just remove the restriction and let the schools decide on their own how to move forward. That seems like a reasonable course of action to me.
That's not to say we can't also pursue other courses, but there's no rational reason not to do this right now.