The executive vice president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, gave a press conference today on the recent school shooting. He had a culprit in mind — the media, which lets kids see all these horribly violent programs — and a solution, which had absolutely nothing to do with addressing his postulated causes. Instead, he proposes that the nation fund armed guards for every school. Really. That’s his serious answer.
LAPIERRE: You know, five years ago after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if — what if when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security? Will you at least admit it’s possible that 26 little kids, that 26 innocent lives might have been spared that day? Is it so important to you (inaudible) would rather continue to risk the alternative? Is the press and the political class here in Washington D.C. so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and American gun owners, that you’re willing to accept the world, where real resistance to evil monsters is alone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life, her life, to shield those children in her care.
No one. No one, regardless of personal, political prejudice has the right to impose that sacrifice.
Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no national one size fits all solution to protecting our children. But do know that this president zeroed out school emergency planning grants in last year’s budget and scrapped Secure Our Schools policing grants in next year’s budget.
With all the foreign aid the United States does, with all the money in the federal budget, can’t we afford to put a police officer in every single school? Even if they did that, politicians have no business and no authority denying us the right, the ability, and the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.
LAPIERRE: Now, the National Rifle Association knows there are millions of qualified and active retired police, active, Reserve, and retired military, security professionals, certified firefighters, security professionals, rescue personnel, an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained, qualified citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every single school.
We could deploy them to protect our kids now. We can immediately make America’s schools safer, relying on the brave men and women in America’s police forces. The budgets — and you all know this, everyone in the country knows this — of our local police departments are strained, and the resources are severely limited, but their dedication and courage is second to none. And, they can be deployed right now.
I call on Congress today, to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation. And, to do it now to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January.
Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation, or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work and by that I mean armed security.
Shorter LaPierre: MOOOOOORRRRE GUUUUUUUUUUNS!
Then we should surround playgrounds, libraries, movie theaters, swimming pools, football fields, grocery stores, candy shops, toy stores, and every place that kids might go with heavily armed guards. Let’s live in fear and turn this country into a police state.
People called him crazy 5 years ago. Now we call him obsessively, dangerously stupid.
Armed guards sure worked for Indira Gandhi.
Preview of this message looks a little strange with the URL pointer in a larger font.
You’re saying that an organization that works for gun manufacturers is in favor of a solution that would require the sale of more guns? How odd.
Yes, that worked so well in Columbine, Colorado! Result, a dead guard added to the body count. And aggravated entitlement is just soo socially responsible! Lastest news: man shot fellow customer for complaining about slow service, teen kicked to death to teach him a lesson, argument over Newtown shooting ends in gunfire, Montana man waterboards four children, two of them his.
I have decided that guns are actually magic wands. You hold them out in front of you, chant some magic words, (die yo scum, etc.) and sometimes sparks come out and you magically feel ten feet tall and two feet long. Stroking them works too. Like all magic, unwise use has repercussions (read T. Pratchett et al for explanations on what happens when magic is used at the wrong time)
Wrong, idea on the source of the funding. The NRA should be funding armed guards out of their yearly dues. Either take moral/financial responsibility for your actions, or go out of business….
I don’t know what it is that make so many people who own guns think that they’re automatically Charles Bronson or forget that even police and military (who have significantly higher gun safety standards than all but the most cautious civilians) manage to both accidentally and intentionally cause wrongful harm to themselves and those around them.
Correction, my mistake! The guard survived although he couldn’t shoot accurately enough to would the spree-killer. It was a teacher who was killed.
about blaming Newtown on hollywood and video games…
if you think this shit is old and ridiculous, you obviously haven’t seen CNNs take on it….
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/12/19/cnn-picks-their-game-to-blame-starcraft/
Starcraft???
are you fucking kidding me?
*wound*
That has got to be the most ignorant shamefully brain dead suggestion ever made on the subject.
How embarrassing, they are lampooning themselves shamelessly, and they do not even realize it!
If only the shooter’s mom had owned guns this would’ve never happened.
Some loon:
Well, I suppose — but better make that at least two (and in full riot gear at that) — else some malevolent but innocent-looking killer could walk in unarmed, politely distract the officer and cosh them, whereupon the killer can arm themselves with the officer’s own weapons!
<snark>
I’m not sure how sarcastic you’re being, but…she did.
The guns he used were hers.
yet the NRA requires all of us, in the US, to sacrifice tens of thousands of people, human beings, are sacrificed and the NRA is determined to continue to impose this sacrifice.
Now here’s a thought. Consider this about armed school guards, who will pay their salaries? And like all good conservatives they will want to pay them with peanuts so the people you will get to do the jobs will be the lowest common denominator.
Crap how they love to whine and moan about the stupid ****s they hire at the TSA to paw through your undies and pat your crotches, now they want to give those same minimum wagers assault weapons and have them “guard” your schools.
The obvious response is that if gun ownership results in bad guys having guns, then gun ownership should be taxed to pay for the needed guards. Preferably up front at the point of sale.
With roughly 100,000 public schools, at $50,000/year per guard, that is roughly $5 billion/year in taxes on gun sales that are needed. With roughly 5 million new guns produced each year, that is an average of $1000 tax on each gun.
If that’s what Wayne LaPierre wants, let him say so!
answer:
around a 10, I’d wager, on the sarcasm scale.
I recently noticed that it’s actually cheaper to buy a semi-automatic 380 pistol in the US, than the average college textbook for any upper division course.
guns cheaper than books.
a story that writes itself?
You can always count on these nimrods for failure of thought. Can an armed guard be everywhere at once? Can an armed guard not be disarmed? Can an armed guard not be killed first? Nah, they don’t want to think, just throw more guns on the fire and roast ’em with a helping of jingoism.
*thinks about what happened at Newtown*
so… your average security guard would have stopped that?
ROFLMAO
yeah, sure.
The schools can cut the art and music programmes to pay for them.
It’ll get contracted out to a company like Halliburton and the school will pay the multinational company $100,000 a year and the armed guard will get $20k with no benefits.
It would seem no one remembers Brenda Spencer anymore. She wasn’t on school property when she did her school shooting.
So he intends to put people into these non-jobs who are otherwise unemployed but have previously worked in occupations using guns. Would you really want a Vet. suffering from post-traumatic stress wandering around your school fearing where the next bullet is coming from.
I have a different assessment. I see no dysfunction in LaPierre’s thinking here. What I see is cynical pandering to his base. His salary comes from member dues (and corporate donations too, I’m sure, but I’m no expert on the NRA’s finances). What he’s proposing is essentially a jobs program for NRA members. He even enumerates categories of people who would qualify for these jobs, in case his base is slow on the uptake.
On the other hand, if he came out in favor if any type of gun control, the NRA would lose members and thus money.
I honestly find the response to be shrewd. This guy knows who writes his paychecks. The two ends of the spectrum of views on gun control are so diametrically opposed that they’re not going to easily find compromise through dialogue. Was anyone really expecting the NRA to make concessions in this statement?
I personally learned a thing or two from LaPierre and he has changed my mind.
We ARE the only country that has movies.
We ARE the only country that has video games.
We ARE the only country that has people with mental illness.
That is why our problem is several orders of magnitude worse than any other developed nation.
/snark
How can people even begin to think these things are a factor when they are available globally? Our unique problem is caused by a unique factor. It is the only social indicator that tracks with gun violence. It is our lax gun regulations.
Oh wait. It seems to me most people actively try not to think. All they understand on this issue are the slogans that get thrown around. If it feels good to their gut, then that is the obvious truth and everyone who disagrees is not a real American.
I am feeling pretty down on us right now.
I remember being in Hungary in the early ’80s and seeing Russians with machine guns sporadically posted in public squares and the like. I wish I had pictures to share. I wonder if that is the vision the NRA wishes to pursue.
I think really, it wasn’t the NRA people were expecting to say anything different, so much as people were hoping their innumerable fanboys would start suddenly realizing that what they’ve been hearing all these long decades are nothing but ridiculous lies.
probably also just as unrealistic a dream.
Caine, trying not to derail, but some of us remember who she is.
Oh joy, Mabus is here.
Can someone call one of the Monitors? The Mabus signal is on.
Alert sent.
I said it elsewhere, I’ll say it here.
This chap wants a national register for people with mental illnesses. I think this is an amazing idea. That way it will be easier to provide a solution to mental illness. Perhaps even a Final Solution.
Louis
P.S. Paging Dr Godwin. Also, please note the heavy sarcasm contained in this post.
I’m not going to talk about the insanity of this from a safety or monetary perspective; y’all have that covered.
What chills me about this kind of talk is that no one seems to acknowledge the psychological toll such theatrics exact on us. The normalizing of armed guards makes the world feel more dangerous. More suspicious. It makes one afraid to do “the wrong thing” for fear of setting off some trigger-happy cop/guard. It makes one feel scrutinized in places one shouldn’t have to feel that way. It makes the ethos of a prison a normal, unremarkable thing at a school, a mall, etc. That’s horrifying.
Look at what has happened to US airports with the rise of the TSA. They’re desperately unpleasant and a lot of it has to do with knowing that incompetent but entitled boobs are watching you and have the full legal authority to make your life miserable over something stupid.
I hate this. And I hate that more people don’t speak out against it. The psychological space of community is important too. It’s not just one of those things we can dispense with because “it makes us safer” (barf). It’s part of quality of life, and dammit, that matters.
There was a shooting in Pennsylvania while LaPierre was giving his bizarre little rant. Five people killed. So far.
[meta]
Very good point, Josh.
Josh, if you are not doing anything wrong, you are no reason to be worried about armed guards.
Just remain polite.
Janine:
Yes, I know. My point was that the Spencer shooting illustrates the pointlessness of an armed guard (along with all the other reasons.) Spencer was safe and secure in her own house.
Correction, ginmar. Three people were murdered. And the murderer was killed in a shoot out.
I am just a little bit pissed off that they are saying that four are dead.
Do not add the murderer as part of the casualty list.
Janine, #35,
Ah yes, the good old logic that underpins “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
In other words, those who fear persecution should be persecuted.
Nice!
Louis
Caine, one could also say the same about Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden.
@Icthyic
In my experience, the NRA position, and that of their more enthusiastic members, tends to be an absolutist position.
I also second Josh’s opinion. Looking at LaPierre’s proposal with an open mind, I’m not convinced that its net effect would be beneficial. We’d be inserting firearms into situations where they’d never normally be, inevitably leading to accidents and abuses. Children’s safety would be entirely subject to the mental health and competence of the guards. And I really don’t want to live in that sort of society. That would be a hard sell for me, as I suspect it would be for most of us.
There are, as mikehuben pointed out, 100,000 public and private elementary schools in the US. This is not counting the typically larger middle and high schools. If there are 2.5 guards per school to allow for days off – front back coverage, admin, etc this is probably a minimum figure — the new elementary school force would be about the same size as the Marine Corps.
They are just blowing smoke
I have only one thing to say:
Shooting with real guns makes you a fine, freedom-defending and upstanding citizen, but shooting with virtual guns makes you a mass-murdering lunatic?
What kind of drugs are these people on?
I dunno,… I’ll accept the second sentence as a working definition of crazy now.
Seems to me, advocating his position means imposing a need for sacrificing the innocent.
If only there had been an armed person at Fort Hood.
Oh. And the NRA needs to STFU and let the grown ups talk now. If they won’t participate in the discussion honestly, they need to get out of the way.
NRA Gun Club video game demo
Seriously. I have no innate opposition to guns. I am opposed to how we are managing them because we are slaughtering ourselves at an alarming rate relative to the rest of the developed world. If the data showed that gun policy did not correlate with gun violence, I would have no interest in putting limits on what people do.
But the real world data does not support that. Meanwhile, the NRA responds to that fact by interfering with data collection at the CDC to make sure that reality does not discredit their position.
Read the Quoted Sections on How the NRA Stifled Studies
Selling video games and blaming video games. Stifling studies. They are a dishonest player. They don’t want to persuade anyone. They want to force everyone to live under their dictate.
They act like they are the only patriots so I ask them to honor what America stands for and use the First Amendment to persuade me, not the Second Amendment to intimidate me.
Meanwhile, they have been steadfastly working to put guns into the hands of convicted felons, including domestic abusers, rapists, and murderers. Felons Finding It Easy to Regain Gun Rights
[blockquote fail]
Interesting,…. CBS reporter Chip Reid finished his report this evening by stating that there was an armed security guard or officer on campus at the Columbine shooting in Colorado, and 13 kids still died.
His statement smacks of the fantasy that school shooters lack any sense of planning,.. that they come in mindlessly and thoughtlessly, making it a ‘piece a cake’ for an armed person (likely, a lightly armed person) to easily take out almost any assailant, especially heavily armed. There seems to be no realization on his part that a person bent on such destruction could very well have a planned attack and could take out any one armed person quickly.
In addition, it’s apparently socially acceptable to Pierre and company to turn schools ( and other institutions and places of public gathering) into potential ‘OK Corrals’ where the answer to a firearms attack is a good ole’, rootin’ tootin’ shoot-out,…you know,… the guys in the white hats save the day.
What does it take to change the modes of thinking in huge swaths of this society?
Right, because a massive expansion of the police state and further stigmatization of the mentally ill are just what America needs to reduce gun violence.
@45 – Military personnel do not routinely carry loaded weapons, except for MPs and sentries, and people in a war zone. What does a paper-pusher need with a loaded weapon on base?
If you are taking a weapon to the firing range, I think that ammo is issued at the range for anyone training or qualifying.
I know I shouldn’t be at this point, but I’m still astonished at the attitude that guns are a good thing to have in society because they protect us from people with guns. That’s like calling an arsonist a hero for putting out a fire he started.
That’s the best they’ve got? Seriously?
Just wait until someone suggests that the same rationale for publicly-funded armed guards at schools applies to Planned Parenthood clinics as well…
Did anyone really expect a positive, rather than defensive, response from the gunners? Treat the symptoms, forget the disease…
I feel if there was a teacher who was comfortable carrying a weapon who was there at Newtown, the outcome might have been different. I don’t think we realize that you can be caring and carry. You aren’t a monster simply because you happen to bring your defense with you. I don’t think we would have to pay anybody, because even the people who we do pay (law enforcement) have limitations. From what I understand, they would be asked to ‘secure the perimeter’ and wait for the SWAT team. But what do I know.
If there were one or even two individuals “identified” as the ‘guns’ of the school, they would be the first targets. That is not the solution. And it has been suggested that hired help may not be so trustworthy – agreed.
I would be comfortable knowing that several individuals are armed at schools (who are trained and comfortable with it); but I have carried before and don’t have a problem with it. I recognize I am not Rambo, but if given the situation, I would really hate myself if I did not do everything in my power to save my friends.
Indeed, better comprehensive background checks and waiting periods would be nice, but of course this person just took his mom’s guns.
A horrible situation that will no doubt occur again somewhere else, in time. I hope someone will be there to stop it. Has there been any discussion with the teachers who lived through this event – if they had had a chance, would they have shot back?
I watched this thing live…and I was just astounded . This guy is from space. It was hallucinatory.
Of course, it’s not like any adult volunteers granted positions of power in environments with children have abused that power, or like predators have been drawn to such opportunities. No examples of that I can think of…
That was my reaction as well.
Blanket safety? I wasn’t aware that blankets played a part in this horrible incident and even if they did, I think they should be focussing more on the guns since blankets at least have a function that doesn’t involve killing people
*blink*
In a week and a half???
Yeah, you can recruit tens of thousands of people to guard schools in 2 weeks. Well, I guess you can, if you make no efforts to check whether they know which end of a gun is which, or whether they’ve got some problem like being a convicted child abuser who shouldn’t be near kids.
Sadly, I expected a response much like this. Although I more expected the NRA to offer up a force of armed volunteers–the demand for Congress to pay for cops was rather unexpected. (Especially since they are rather big on “Cops are never there when needed, therefore I need GUNS!”) I’ve heard LaPierre basically say that people who don’t carry guns are parasites on those who do, so this is nothing surprising–the best to hope for is they might have pissed off some of their members (A guy can dream…..).
Janinie at 37:
I’m going to disagree. The killers are human, and part of the numbers of dead. I work with kids this age every day, and I have cried a lot in the last week. And part of the reason I have cried is because this young man was not a monster; he was as human as I am, and there’s no way to predict when or who the next killer is going to be. That’s horrible to me. I don’t feel particularly afraid of it happening to my kids. I know the chances are still small. But it’s happening more often, and more kids are going to die.
I was actually physically ill when I read a story last night about how lots of folks are using the number 26 when describing the number of dead in Newton. The media are doing it. Obama did it. They are not just leaving out the shooter, they are leaving out his mom. She’s dead, and her son is dead. Too many people are dead.
Damn! sorry for both misspelling your name, and for being familiar, Janine: Hallucinating Liar. I was going to fix it before posting, and got distracted.
Next time, please spell my name correctly.
I did not deny the humanity of the murderer. But he was not murdered by someone on a killing spree. He was killed in the act of stopping him from killing more.
He is not a victim. And I resent having him placed on the victim role.
As for this crap from the NRA, I’ll say it again: I don’t want my choice to be ‘die or kill’. And I don’t want the kids I work with to ever have to even think about all this shit, let alone see someone every day who will remind them of it. We already do lock-down drills, and that sucks enough. Kindergarteners practicing hiding in a corner, or running out the door to ‘scatter and meet at a pre-determined meeting place’.
This is not the world I want to live in, and for some batshit reason, the gun nuts get to decide that it is the world I get.
I think I’m on the same page as Josh at 32.
Sorry, Janine. I see I mis-read you. So many others have been denying his humanity, but that doesn’t excuse me for not reading your comment more carefully.
They are not just leaving out his mom, they are leaving her out on purpose. I can’t retrace my steps to where I read it, but I saw a whole article about that and how she is being deliberately excluded on the basis that it’s her fault, too. And in fact, some people are blaming her more (than the adult son who did it) since “she raised him that way” and she was the one who had the guns in the house. Funnily enough, I wouldn’t think those same people would be on board with putting it into law that anyone who owns a gun should be charged with homicide if a gun used in a crime can be traced back to them.
carlie:
In the article I linked to above, from the Washington Post, they discuss what you say. Here’s a quote from a Newtown parent:
We don’t know what her son’s issues were. People are assuming that he must have had serious issues that were obvious, otherwise, how can you explain what happened? How can you feel safe?
And I’m saddened by her use of the word ‘innocent’, implying that his mom was not, and therefore was somehow deserving of what happened to her. I understand that fear and grief are part of this, but it’s still very sad.
I do not think we know enough about the situation at home to know how dangerous it was for Adam Lanza to be around them.
But I am also of the opinion that such assault weapons should not be easily available to anyone.
Janine:
I agree completely, and find it dumbfounding that this discussion is even happening. Easy access to semi-automatic weapons and magazines that can hold dozens to a hundred bullets? That’s madness. And the answer: more guns? Gunfights above the heads of five-year-olds? Beyond madness.
My (poorly made) point was that, though I wish his mother had not had these weapons at all, she does not deserve so much blame that anyone should think of her deserving what happened to her. Would we blame her if someone had broken in and stolen them? At least so far, I don’t think we even know if he did have open or easy access to them.
The only reason I don’t think such a plan would work is because the same right wing loons would complain about paying these lazy, shiftless workers on the government dole within a year and then cut budgets. Plus, how are these guards supposed to identify potential threats when everyone is packing, being good Americans ready to defend themselves and others? That would get confusing.
But as to armed guards making schools safer – of course they can. I’m not sure what is seen as the technical problem with this in practice (aside from the armed citizenry issue). Look at what our police are capable of:
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/12/cleveland_police_shooting.html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121217/16231921411/police-chief-deploys-officers-with-assault-rifles-to-stop-id-everyone-says-local-crime-stats-give-him-probable-cause.shtml
And most people are willing and able to live their lives just fine with the threat of security looming over their heads. If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
To the people who wondered who was sponsoring the NRA: here ya go.
It made my day a couple days back to be able to disavow a close acquaintance of that very notion.
It’s easy to run away with an unsupported hypothesis in our inevitable attempt at “othering” the shooter and anyone who might have sympathized with him (family, friends, etc.).
When any of us can actually, through patient presentation of facts, curtail using “othering” to form unsupported conclusions, I think we should pat ourselves on the back. It’s bloody rare enough!
bookmarked for inevitable future reference!
I’ve seen enough of stand-your-ground laws to know where this is going. Some kid would be acting up or even just roughhousing, and that guard would perceive them as a threat, and that would be that. A bunch of armed guards at schools would end up with a bunch of dead kids, especially POC.
—
Paul K :
#66: Well said.
and # 69
Well said again.
People want to think that it’s obvious who would do these things, because it makes us feel like we can notice it beforehand and prevent tragedy. No-one wants to believe that this could happen to them, or to people they love. No-one wants to think that humans are capable of things like that, so they blame it on something else. No-one wants to think that our society could cause these things, because that makes us all susceptible, so we blame it on the individual and hope it goes away.
Ichthyic, 75:
I’ve worked to do that this week with folks at the school where I work, and with others I know in my town. I think I may have convinced one of them, but the others were very dismissive. They didn’t even want to hear what I had to say. He had to be ‘just a crazy person’. It’s hard to blame them. I wish it was that easy myself.
So let me get this straight. Conservatives want small government and less government spending – except when they want to put armed representatives of the government in every school and to massively increase government spending to do so. I am sure the NRA members will approve a bill raising their taxes to pay for the thousands of armed guards needed, right?
And what good does the holy 2nd Amendment do when it isn’t the government trying to turn the country into a police state but the people who worship the 2nd Amendment as a means of preventing this? The NRA is suggesting doing the very thing they claim to fear and aim to prevent through force of stupidity and ignorance.
And now people of colour, already dealing with the crimes of “Being black whilst driving” and their like, can look forward to the new crime of “Looking a bit out of place near a school for some reason I’ll invent after I’ve shot them”. Despite the fact that these mass shooters inevitably turn out to be privileged white guys. Or will these cops somehow be different to other cops?
But don’t worry, I’ve heard the NRA have solutions to all the world’s problems in the works. AIDs epidemic – more people with AIDs. World poverty – more poor people. High rates of teen pregnancy – more teen sex. Illegal drug use – more people doing drugs.
Consistency is the key after all.
Jimmy_Blue:
And we need these guards to be in place in less than two weeks.
I just cannot help thinking that this absolutely nutty idea is not the least bit serious. What the NRA leadership is really saying is ‘Fuck you all! We love guns and dead kids don’t matter. In fact, they make us love our sweet guns all the more.’
And I’m reading now that the NRA is considered weak by some other gun worshipping groups.
How about a simple solution…
Just lock the fucking doors after the school bell rings. All visitors would have to enter through a separate entrance to a secured office area to be allowed in. Of course the door locks would not prevent opening the doors from the inside, in case of an emergency or whatever.
That should keep most armed killers out or at least slow them down.
Oh, I forgot…there should also be sharks with Laaazzzers in a pool that has a special trapdoor.
michaelsternberg:
I’m not sure how snarky you’re being, but as for your first suggestion, many schools I’ve worked in have done just that. As did the school in Newtown. He forced his way in.
Aha! My business venture is about to pay off!
people said I was mad to start breeding cyborg sharks with built in lasers, but I knew that people would want them!
I feel I can speak to the put-guards-in-all-the-schools argument, since a) I went to a school that had guards (albeit, I don’t think they had guns) and b) due to a threat received earlier, my son’s HS was patrolled by armed police this week.
In my school the guard did not perceptibly increase safety. He was incredibly easy to sneak past. Even I as a student so straight-laced I received exactly one detention in my entire school career (late library book), snuck past him to go have lunch at home at least a dozen times. Oh yes – he was also the school drug dealer.
In my son’s HS, the armed police around did not make me feel like my son was safer. The police at large did, when they tracked down the source of the threats, arrested the person responsible, and determined that they were neither intending to do anything, nor capable of carrying out a serious attack. (Said person is now up on felony charges of making terroristic threats.) The police patrolling the school just made me very nervous for my introverted son, who always wears all-enveloping black hoodies to school.
If trained police, who are there for a specific reason make me nervous, I don’t think armed, bored volunteers of unknown training and provenance are going to make me feel safe and relaxed.
moot ….. google “printed guns”.
I think I get it. Basically, US is one, big Stanford prison experiment still going on.
Buing a gun is an easy way to get from the prisoners group to the guards group. It’s all there is to it.
keresthanatos, futuristic fapping.
(There’s a reason guns are not made from plastic)
Apart from everything else, it can’t be the most stimulating job ever, waiting for an event that’s most likely going to happen somewhere else. How long before one of the guards shoots up a school out of sheer boredom?
LaPierre should be encouraged to speak out more often because his speech has surely helped the cause to introduce proper arms control in the US.
Unfortunately, after this PR disaster I suspect he won’t last long in this role.
Instead the NRA will find someone more practiced at making meaningless speeches which seem to express concern about atrocities while continuing to do nothing about it. A bishop would be the obvious and perfect choice.
Kevs not so sure about that. LaPierre holds near godlike status among the right wing. With his ability to focus votes and capital.
Who knows though, maybe this tips the scales but LaPierre has said similarily detached from reality statements before…
Just not after an event like this, because he typically stays quiet after mass shootings.
This is downright silly. It’s not about being comfortable around guns.
The required skill set is acting as a bodyguard. Even the standard armed school or university guard wouldn’t qualify for the sort of fast reaction/accurate shooting required to act as a protective service agent (for little kids rather than VIPs in this instance). And a lot of what they do is getting the protected person into a safe place – and they do a lot of planning for escape avenues and the like.
Most police officers don’t even have these skills. The training is demanding in the first place (who pays for that) and maintaining the full skill set is not just going along to a shooting range every now and again (who will pay for the frequent skills maintenance days, fitness testing and all the rest of it).
This really is just the NRA demonstrating a terrible example of gun safety by shooting itself in the foot
In the UK the PM, other Government ministers, embassies and such come under the protection of the diplomatic protection corps, part of the police. They one of the few branches of the police to be routinely armed. They are very selective over who they will accept into their ranks, and they spend around 25% of their time training or undergoing assessment as to their continued fitness. As a result they are expensive.
Rev said
Have you seen this?
There are two entries related to the NRA.
Oh, don’t be silly, people. The NRA is working out a volunteer plan that will staff every school in the country with armed sentries, and it won’t cost a single taxpayer cent! Win-win all around! Just find a couple hundred thousand unemployed guys, give them guns, and put them in schools, and all our problems are solved.
You may own all the guns you want. Just ban the ammunition.
@freetinkerer (#57):
Really? Because there was some comfortable carrying a gun at the Gabby Giffords shooting in Tucson, and he very nearly made things worse:
I’d just like to suggest that we stop allowing the NRA to present themselves as having anything to do with the 2nd amendment. It doesn’t take much research to learn that Colonial and early American militias were formed to support the government, not to overthrow it. The Constitution states that the President is the commander in chief of the militia. If conservatives were actually concerned about being able to overthrow an “illegitimate government,” they’d stop funding the military.
No, the NRA is just an advertising and lobbying arm of the firearms industry, no different than the Texas Beef Council. The oligarchy has many party hats.
judithsanders:
I agree. The thing is, the beliefs of the gun culture go far beyond the NRA now. They go all the way up to the Supreme Court. I really hope this incident brings actual change, but it won’t be easy. Nearly everything I’ve ever read that tries to argue for the protection of gun ‘rights’ has been bogus, even laughably so, but people who believe strongly don’t need sensible arguments, they just need faith and determination. Those two things make lying, and belief in lies, very easy.
Hmm… I sure sounded like someone preaching to the choir there. We do need to be loud and clear about the bullshit the NRA is spouting, and they were particularly obvious in their batshittiness on Friday morning. Maybe if enough people point it out, and just laugh, or cry, at its ridiculousness, people with actual power to do something about it will stand up for sense.
For #64:
This: NRA Member’s Tribute to Those Lost in Newtown
(also this: https://www.facebook.com/joe.stutler/posts/10151189091927810)
So lets get this straight..you want to put a civilian in fear of his/her life with a small handgun dressed in light cotton polyester clothing against someone who is obviously planning on dying armed with multiple weapons including an assault rifle wearing a bullet proof vest and a tactical vest with hundreds of extra rounds of ammunition.
How do you think that’s gonna work out?
We are the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons on another country. We spend more money on our military than the next 26 countries combined spend on their military. Something else is wrong here – guns are just another symptom.
I looked into the current research associating gun ownership with homicide, both inter and intranationally, and, while the research does lean a little toward a positive correlation, the research remains mostly inconclusive (much less agreement then in climate change for example). Take this recent paper challenging the validity of international correlations for example:
Reassessing the Association between Gun Availability and Homicide at the Cross-National Level
Because of the inconclusive nature of the research I’m split as to whether restricting the freedom of gun ownership is sufficiently justified.
mbane:
If you meant to actually link to that article, it didn’t work. Using the title you gave in a Google search, I was only able to access the abstract, which concluded with:
First, I don’t know what nations they compared. Some places are in chaos and without working systems to curtail violence. Second, I don’t know of anyone who is for stricter gun control who says that the problem in this country is simply that there are too many guns available. We are a culture that thinks violence is an appropriate early response. See paulburnett’s comment at 105, right above yours. I work with kids the age of those riddled with bullets in Newtown. It seems a sensible answer to me that, in a culture steeped in violence and swimming in guns designed for mass killings, the thing to do first is to GET RID OF THE FUCKING GUNS.
No you are not. The decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan was a decision of the US, the UK and Canada. That all three countries needed to approve their use was established under the Quebec Agreement.
He is part of the casualty list. He’s in a way his own victim.
In Japan, maybe 20 years ago, a schoolgirl died while trying to get into the school while the gate was closing. I’m against the death penalty for being late.
You sure showed ’em!
@57:
Um, I wouldn’t. First, despite gun-nut fantasies, it’s unclear that having randomly armed people present is going to ameliorate a mass shooting. You might reduce the fatalities by a few, or then again, you might increase them by a few. In those rare situations where some armed citizen was on the scene when the mass shooting started, it usually turns out that the shooting is over by the time the person arrives with his gun drawn. As best as I can tell, there is not a single clear-cut case in which an armed bystander has saved a life during a mass shooting event (there is at least one case I can think of where an armed security guard did).
But putting that aside, even if we assume that having an armed citizen or three nearby will reduce the body count somewhat during a mass shooting, we have to subtract from that the increased body count from “everyday” gun violence. Every time a person goes out in public packing heat, there is a small but nonzero chance that their gun will end up wrongfully injuring or killing someone. The chances are much higher if the person is not highly trained. It may be an accidental discharge, or the gun gets stolen, or the person attacks someone who wasn’t really a threat, etc. These things happen all the time. Injuries from accidents outnumber homicides. If you have tens of thousands of schools with armed people in them, even non-stupid ones, you will get more deaths and injuries. I suppose it’s possible, but I find it extremely unlikely that any lives saved, if there are any at all, will exceed the extra ones lost.
Area Man, 110:
But, but… heroism, and tough guys, and white hats! What you say is reasonable, and as far as I can tell from my own experience and understanding of the country we live in, already backed up by reality.
The guns crowd seem to have this Old West outlook, and long for the good old days that are shown in the oh-so historically accurate Westerns they watched back in the day. The thing is, most folks who actually lived in frontier towns, and even many of them in the fictional ones, longed for the day when they would become ‘civilized’ enough that toting guns would no longer be necessary or allowed.
What is rather extremely obvious to me as a non-American, when reading stories written by non-professional US authors, is that their solution to even fairly low-level crime seems to almost always be the same: kill the perp! Laws? Corrupt or powerless. (Also, historicals are almost exclusively situated in the old West.)
This suggests to me rather strongly that the basic problem is cultural. (As if other news didn’t already tell me that.)
Of course, as someone else already said, that makes it more, not less, important to reduce easy access to guns …
I think that is even reflected in the appeal of the feaux “cowboy image” that people like Reagan and Bush played up.
I remember thinking how Deadwood (the HBO series), seemed to be working towards a more accurate portrayal of not just gun violence in the “old west” and how random it was (Wild Bill’s shooting, for example), but blurring the whole white hat/black hat meme. I found myself rooting for Swearington a lot. I think they at least tried to suggest that most people, “bad guys” included, just wanted some stability and NOT to have to worry about who was going to pull a gun next and shoot someone.
that said, it’s still a far cry from an educational documentary :)
…oh, and I’m sure some gun aficionado will come along and tell me that “as many people died from knives as guns in Deadwood!”
*sigh*
I really fucking liked Deadwood.
http://www.thewvsr.com/deadwood.htm
Many trained soldiers either freeze or shoot literally aimless when in a firefight. These are people who have been given weeks of training and are expecting a firefight to happen. So it really annoys me when the NRA and other gunnutz say the fix to school shootings is having armed teachers and admin workers.
But at least among rich countries, it does seem that countries with high rates of gun ownership also have high rates of gun deaths. See here and here.
Top eight gun ownership rate rich countries in order: USA, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, France, Austria.
Top eight gun death rate* rich countries** in order: USA, Canada, Finland, Switzerland, France, Austria, New Zealand, Belgium.
On a slightly different point, I’ve noted before that among rich countries, total homicide rates correlate well with income inequality. Two countries are notably out of line: the USA has far higher rates than it “should” have, while Singapore, where gun ownership is extremely low (0.5 per 100 inhabitants, compare the USA’s 88.8), has far fewer homicides than it “should”.
* Includes homicide, suicide and accident. USA is again first in homicides alone, Canada second, Switzerland third if you don’t count Greece as rich, which seems reasonable.
**In previous discussions, I put Switzerland second. The wikipedia page has been edited very recently (20th December), and I’m pretty sure I was reporting it correctly before, but whether the update gives better data or not, the general trend is the same.
Come on now – don’t you know the good guys always win?
“”
My #119 wasn’t a premature post or an offering to Tpyos, but the only way I could think off to express my utter incredulity – the online equivalent of being speechless. If you were going to put armed outsiders into schools, would you not want to carry out some security and proficiency checks on them first? This guy is beyond belief, beyond satire, beyond whatever is beyond those things. That he could say such a thing and not be laughed off the stage is an indictment of the American media beyond anything I can recall hearing about.
Nick:
Just out of curiosity, does anybody know of any statistics broken down into gun types? I would expect bolt-action rifles, shotguns, automatic and semiautomatic rifles and pistols would have very different violence profiles.
And while my neck of the woods have a lot of guns, they’re mostly hunting weapons – bolt-action rifles and breach-loading shotguns the most common.
Skimming, so I’m sorry if I missed a link already to this:
David Frum did a long, long series of tweets on the 21st describing where armed guards would be needed to protect people from shooters, using the NRA’s “logic”, with links on each one to a shooting death there. (it was retweeted by Greta Christina). An abbreviated list:
We need a federal agent at every public swimming pool
We need a federal agent at every Christian college
We need a federal agent at every hospital
We need a federal agent at every gas station
We need a federal agent at every yacht club
We need a federal agent in every taxicab
We need a federal agent in every library
We need a federal agent at every muffler shop
We need a federal agent at every Hallowe’en party
We need a federal agent at every marriage proposal
we need a federal agent to protect every little girl with a stupid relative
etc.
Nick Gotts, 120:
This is why I think that they are not making this suggestion seriously. They are appealing to their base (many of whom think the NRA is not batty enough when it comes to guns, and the NRA doesn’t want to lose them to groups like Gun Owners of America), trying to sell more guns for their sponsors, and trying to just stop the debate before it goes anywhere. They’ve always succeeded doing just that in the past, but this time I wish that they did just become laughingstocks. The problem is that our media ‘respect’ everyone on the right now, no matter what they do or say, because they don’t want to be accused of being liberal; a lie made up by the very folks who don’t seem to have any intention of continuing their stampede to the right.
I don’t watch TV, but just Googled ‘guns fox news’, and it looks like, so far, they have not jumped right into the NRA’s lap. Maybe that’s a good sign.