Hey, I’m a teacher! What should I get? I like the sound of the word “Glock”, but I could also go with Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum, or maybe what Bond uses.
blfsays
I note none of the people pictured are guilty of Education whilst Black.
Some Old Programmersays
blf @2–I just flashed on an armed black educator when the cops show up; no good outcome seems likely.
microraptorsays
Matt G @1: Well, given that the threat of attack could come from any of your students, and possibly even multiple students at a time, I recommend getting a thermoabric rocket launcher capable of wiping out the entire class in one shot. It’s the only way you’ll be able to protect yourself and the other student from a hostile gunman with certainty.
gmacssays
My brother lives in bear country. He carries a gun on the job… but that’s because he works alone in the fucking wilderness.
His wife is a teacher. She does not carry a gun at work. They both want it to stay that way.
blfsays
microraptor@4, The problem with that strategy is it still depends on who pulls the trigger first. A better approach (for the teacher) is to install remote-control mines under each desk, and, on the first day, before entering the classroom (last — important point), set them off. For the students, the best approach is to nuke the mandatory preterm facility meeting prior to the first day.
For course, there is an escalating chain here. For instance, the facility can take the precaution of nuking (probably from orbit) the township, the students can take the precaution of going on a foreign vacation, the facility can take the preprecaution of hiring the Vogons, and so on…
Eventually, you get to the point where Davros and the Dalek’s reality bomb makes sense. Except that didn’t work either…
Gregory Greenwoodsays
It tells you something about the mindset of trump and his NRA supporters when they think the best way to protect students from gun violence is to take a potential for a mass shooting caused by the over abundance of guns in US society and the near total lack of background checks before their sales, and ‘fix’ it by..,. adding more guns. So, you wind up with a firefight in a classroom, and a teacher with at best minimal gun training is supposed to be able to engage and incapacitate or kill the attacker without harming the students, when those students might be panicking and running for their lives occluding the teacher’s line of fire and the attacker might use a human shield – even highly trained law enforcement agents find that incredibly challenging, how is a barely trained teacher likely to fair? And that assumes a rational, responsible teacher in charge of the weapon; what if you get someone who thinks they are John McClain, and starts blazing away like they are in their own personal action movie at the least provocation? What of racist teacher just looking for any excuse to shoot Black students for the crime of receiving an education while Black?
What happens when the police do arrive on the scene? In the confusion, they may well not be able to determine the number of attackers, since anyone with a gun is a potential threat. It is quite possible that the teacher might wind up shot by the police as they react to the attack (as noted up thread, doubly so if that teacher is Black and the cops continue in the usual pattern of behaviour), and a panicked, arm,ed teacher could well fire upon the police, believing the to be armed assailants of the school should their uniforms not be easily identifiable or out of straightforward agitation and confusion.
Since the attack likely won’t come with any warning, what about the status of the teacher’s weapon? If it is properly secured and unloaded, by the time the teacher can reach their weapon and load it, many students could be killed or maimed, as could the teacher themselves, eliminating the notion that this idiotic policy increases safety by reducing reaction time to an attack. If the teacher carries a loaded weapon in a holster for ease of access, not only does that create a threatening environment for the students, but it creates a significant risk of injury or death through accidental discharge of the weapon, and that doesn’t cover the possibility that it could be one of the armed teachers that goes on a shooting spree one day. Then there is the point that a teacher bringing a weapon to the classroom offers opportunity for potential attacker – why bring your own gun, when the school obligingly provides firearms on the premises?
There are so very many ways this could go profoundly wrong, and worsen the body count of an attack dramatically, that you are left with two possible interpretations. Either the NRA and Trump are so jaw-droppingly stupid that they honestly can’t see the issues with this misbegotten policy, or they just don’t care, and more guns is their knee jerk response since protecting their precious firearms means more to them than protecting innocent lives. The latter explanation seems by far the more likely to me.
lbsays
Gregory Greenwood: Those are all very excellent questions.
shadowsays
Rylothian slave collars? Imperial cranial bombs? Either could work as well.
microraptorsays
Gregory Greenwood @7: See, all the things you listed are only problems if you actually care about the lives of students or teachers, which Dump and the National Gunlobby Association clearly do not.
jrkrideausays
One does realize that just about every country in the world is cheering this on? The US hegemony is self-destructing and new markets are opening.
And we have a new market for those damn guns.
Arm the librarians!!
tallgrass05says
School of Glock! School of Glock!
hemidactylussays
I don’t have the numbers to back me, so am speculating from my nethers, but I suspect Obama was a godsend for the gunshops and associated weapons/ammo industry. They must have marketed his perceived threat into huge sales. Plus Obama inadvertently radicalized some of the right into a stronger bunker mentality to “prep” for the NWO stormtroopers and their concentration camps. Money in the bank.
hemidactylussays
So with Obama gone the only way to up gun sales is market the appeal to teachers, a demographic that may tend leftward thus may not be mostly gun toters yet. A gun in every classroom would be a huge boon to the guns and ammo industry.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
I was on the safety committee of the small chemical company I worked at for 28 years for much of my career. One theme from the actual safety professionals was “intrinsically safe”. One example was a battery forklift for the production area that had the electrical motors sealed so that sparks never got out, versus one that didn’t, when going into an area where organic vapors (lower alcohols), were present. The sealed unit was intrinsically safe, whereas the unsealed unit wasn’t.
The only intrinsically safe firearm is one unload, and the weapon and ammo stored separately in lockers. This was also my initial firearms training from the boy scouts circa 1960 based on NRA rules at the time, which were based on military range rules.
Any “carry” is intrinsically unsafe, much less in a school environment where children are present.
So, any RESPONSIBLE gun owner, who was also a school teacher, would lock their weapons and ammo away from children, and not in their desks, so that there is absolutely no access by the children to their guns. Which means lockers in the faculty lounge or main office, where children aren’t present.
So, if an intrusion, a very low probability occurrence, happens, the teacher must make make their way, ignoring their students they left behind, to their gun/ammo lockers and make their weapon useful in the near future, as range safety rules require.
Then they have to find the person, and shoot at them. I recall seeing a year where the NYPD did not hit anybody they were aiming at beyond 12 feet away. There is also the problem of what happens if your bullet misses. I grew up in SW Michigan, and by law deer was hunted with shotguns. Why? If missed the shotgun slug was on the ground after a few hundred yards. A 30-06, like legal in Dah YooPee, could kill people far behind the deer if missed. Population density made the difference.
Admittedly, some schools could have someone like one of the Redhead’s bosses on a summer job. An ex-Green Beret. One who said “give them the money, I’ll take care of them outside”. Avoiding co-lateral (friendly fire) damage.
robrosays
To hell with guns. Give’m nukes. Anyway, education is a damn liberal institution…close the schools!
weylguysays
#14 – hemidactylus
Great point that nobody’s talking about! And who will pay for all those guns, the ammo and the training? The fuckingly stupid U.S. taxpayer.
Maybe the NRA should go public: an IPO would make LaPierre and his minions billionaires overnight. Isn’t that what capitalism’s all about?
hemidactylussays
The NRA are shameless enablers of violent merciless bloodshed. And they have legislative marionettes. We need another Black Lives Matter sort of concerted action from high school students nationwide to shame these bastards into surrender!
Strangely there exists on the fringes of the wacky religious right a voice of reason? I realize Mehta may not be very popular in these parts but:
Don’t have the exact figures, but I’ve seen them, and after the election of Obama, gun and ammunition sales in the US skyrocketed and stayed high for all eight years of his presidency. Gun stores openly advertised using signs reading “get your guns before Obama bans them all.”
The day after Trump was elected, gun sales had their biggest slump in a decade and gun stores and manufacturers have been struggling to find a new way to get people back to buying now that there isn’t a liberal president and Congress to scare them with.
dhartersays
Wait am I the only one not bothered by the bullets on the floor or the guns on the desk, but, why in the world does the kid have an eraser on his head?
Hatchetfishsays
Not even bears, really. .223 mostly irritates bears.
gijoelsays
If only there had been a good guy with a gun at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This whole thing could have been avoided. Oh wait, there was one.
davidc1says
@18 Well bugger me ,never thought i would see the day when Mr Robinson would say something sensible .
Saganite, a haunter of demonssays
They’re just lucky that so much in manufacturing is automated by now. Imagine if they had to educate people in how to actually produce guns? Or design them? In fact, hundreds of years from now, the AR-15 will still be largely unchanged, while the rest of the world has switched over to phasers and railguns.
ajbjasussays
Curious that the armed policeman, who presumably is very used to toting a gun, who was assigned to protect the school in Florida decided to stay outside.
However it appears that teachers will be able to clinically take down some crazed lunatic with nary a second thought.
Athaicsays
@ blf #2
I note none of the people pictured are guilty of Education whilst Black.
A common – and justified – criticism of Norman Rockwell’s earlier works, of which this picture is an obvious call-out. A good number of minorities fell out of Rockwell’s pictures, during his time at the Saturday Evening Post.
I like to think that it was more a case of social myopia than outright malice, in Rockwell’s case. Also, a big case of editorial meddling. Once he got out of the Saturday Evening Post, he started producing a lot more social-issue oriented portraits.
Because of his previous “sanitized”, feel-good works, his later portraits are more powerful in their representations of social or political issues.
The one which really wrenched my guts was “The Problem We All Live With”, which I discovered in a art book about Norman Rockwell. The accompanying text was an interview of Rockwell, and on how he was flabbergasted – and horrified – that hundreds of adults will drop everything else and come everyday so they can yell at, threaten and throw things at a 6-year old schoolgirl, only because she is Black.
I just can’t even imagine that it’s like to live like that.
Fifty years later, their are still too many people like that, and not just in the US.
blf Waaaaay back at #2
“I note none of the people pictured are guilty of Education whilst Black.”
At least the target is a token black!
blfsays
Athaic@26, Thanks for the synopsis of Norman Rockwell’s “social myopia”, and for that matter, confirming my (unstated) hunch the underlying picture is a Rockwell (it’s not one I recognize, but certainly seems to be his style & typical(?) subject matter). Yes, the 1964 The Problem We All Live With is also the one I immediately think of when Rockwell’s work and civil rights are mentioned.
One kid in the painting has an eraser on his head to keep him still in his seat. He was fidgeting, probably, and “sit still” commands did not work. Considering the old fashioned nature of the scene, the student might also have been failing to “sit up straight.” At least the teach didn’t shoot him.
a_ray_in_dilbert_spacesays
Oh, it gets better. The proposal I heard was for the NRA to teach a class especially for teachers–for a nominal fee, of course.
blfsays
The proposal I heard was for the NRA to teach a class especially for teachers
I’m tempted to suggest the live ammunition practice use the instructor as the target, but besides being completely unethical, any instructor with brains would teach how to miss, thereby further increasing the extreme risk to students, other teachers, and the class goldfish as the armed teacher follows their training and fails to hit the actual threat.
Hey, I’m a teacher! What should I get? I like the sound of the word “Glock”, but I could also go with Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum, or maybe what Bond uses.
I note none of the people pictured are guilty of Education whilst Black.
blf @2–I just flashed on an armed black educator when the cops show up; no good outcome seems likely.
Matt G @1: Well, given that the threat of attack could come from any of your students, and possibly even multiple students at a time, I recommend getting a thermoabric rocket launcher capable of wiping out the entire class in one shot. It’s the only way you’ll be able to protect yourself and the other student from a hostile gunman with certainty.
My brother lives in bear country. He carries a gun on the job… but that’s because he works alone in the fucking wilderness.
His wife is a teacher. She does not carry a gun at work. They both want it to stay that way.
microraptor@4, The problem with that strategy is it still depends on who pulls the trigger first. A better approach (for the teacher) is to install remote-control mines under each desk, and, on the first day, before entering the classroom (last — important point), set them off. For the students, the best approach is to nuke the mandatory preterm facility meeting prior to the first day.
For course, there is an escalating chain here. For instance, the facility can take the precaution of nuking (probably from orbit) the township, the students can take the precaution of going on a foreign vacation, the facility can take the preprecaution of hiring the Vogons, and so on…
Eventually, you get to the point where Davros and the Dalek’s reality bomb makes sense. Except that didn’t work either…
It tells you something about the mindset of trump and his NRA supporters when they think the best way to protect students from gun violence is to take a potential for a mass shooting caused by the over abundance of guns in US society and the near total lack of background checks before their sales, and ‘fix’ it by..,. adding more guns. So, you wind up with a firefight in a classroom, and a teacher with at best minimal gun training is supposed to be able to engage and incapacitate or kill the attacker without harming the students, when those students might be panicking and running for their lives occluding the teacher’s line of fire and the attacker might use a human shield – even highly trained law enforcement agents find that incredibly challenging, how is a barely trained teacher likely to fair? And that assumes a rational, responsible teacher in charge of the weapon; what if you get someone who thinks they are John McClain, and starts blazing away like they are in their own personal action movie at the least provocation? What of racist teacher just looking for any excuse to shoot Black students for the crime of receiving an education while Black?
What happens when the police do arrive on the scene? In the confusion, they may well not be able to determine the number of attackers, since anyone with a gun is a potential threat. It is quite possible that the teacher might wind up shot by the police as they react to the attack (as noted up thread, doubly so if that teacher is Black and the cops continue in the usual pattern of behaviour), and a panicked, arm,ed teacher could well fire upon the police, believing the to be armed assailants of the school should their uniforms not be easily identifiable or out of straightforward agitation and confusion.
Since the attack likely won’t come with any warning, what about the status of the teacher’s weapon? If it is properly secured and unloaded, by the time the teacher can reach their weapon and load it, many students could be killed or maimed, as could the teacher themselves, eliminating the notion that this idiotic policy increases safety by reducing reaction time to an attack. If the teacher carries a loaded weapon in a holster for ease of access, not only does that create a threatening environment for the students, but it creates a significant risk of injury or death through accidental discharge of the weapon, and that doesn’t cover the possibility that it could be one of the armed teachers that goes on a shooting spree one day. Then there is the point that a teacher bringing a weapon to the classroom offers opportunity for potential attacker – why bring your own gun, when the school obligingly provides firearms on the premises?
There are so very many ways this could go profoundly wrong, and worsen the body count of an attack dramatically, that you are left with two possible interpretations. Either the NRA and Trump are so jaw-droppingly stupid that they honestly can’t see the issues with this misbegotten policy, or they just don’t care, and more guns is their knee jerk response since protecting their precious firearms means more to them than protecting innocent lives. The latter explanation seems by far the more likely to me.
Gregory Greenwood: Those are all very excellent questions.
Rylothian slave collars? Imperial cranial bombs? Either could work as well.
Gregory Greenwood @7: See, all the things you listed are only problems if you actually care about the lives of students or teachers, which Dump and the National Gunlobby Association clearly do not.
One does realize that just about every country in the world is cheering this on? The US hegemony is self-destructing and new markets are opening.
And we have a new market for those damn guns.
Arm the librarians!!
School of Glock! School of Glock!
I don’t have the numbers to back me, so am speculating from my nethers, but I suspect Obama was a godsend for the gunshops and associated weapons/ammo industry. They must have marketed his perceived threat into huge sales. Plus Obama inadvertently radicalized some of the right into a stronger bunker mentality to “prep” for the NWO stormtroopers and their concentration camps. Money in the bank.
So with Obama gone the only way to up gun sales is market the appeal to teachers, a demographic that may tend leftward thus may not be mostly gun toters yet. A gun in every classroom would be a huge boon to the guns and ammo industry.
I was on the safety committee of the small chemical company I worked at for 28 years for much of my career. One theme from the actual safety professionals was “intrinsically safe”. One example was a battery forklift for the production area that had the electrical motors sealed so that sparks never got out, versus one that didn’t, when going into an area where organic vapors (lower alcohols), were present. The sealed unit was intrinsically safe, whereas the unsealed unit wasn’t.
The only intrinsically safe firearm is one unload, and the weapon and ammo stored separately in lockers. This was also my initial firearms training from the boy scouts circa 1960 based on NRA rules at the time, which were based on military range rules.
Any “carry” is intrinsically unsafe, much less in a school environment where children are present.
So, any RESPONSIBLE gun owner, who was also a school teacher, would lock their weapons and ammo away from children, and not in their desks, so that there is absolutely no access by the children to their guns. Which means lockers in the faculty lounge or main office, where children aren’t present.
So, if an intrusion, a very low probability occurrence, happens, the teacher must make make their way, ignoring their students they left behind, to their gun/ammo lockers and make their weapon useful in the near future, as range safety rules require.
Then they have to find the person, and shoot at them. I recall seeing a year where the NYPD did not hit anybody they were aiming at beyond 12 feet away. There is also the problem of what happens if your bullet misses. I grew up in SW Michigan, and by law deer was hunted with shotguns. Why? If missed the shotgun slug was on the ground after a few hundred yards. A 30-06, like legal in Dah YooPee, could kill people far behind the deer if missed. Population density made the difference.
Admittedly, some schools could have someone like one of the Redhead’s bosses on a summer job. An ex-Green Beret. One who said “give them the money, I’ll take care of them outside”. Avoiding co-lateral (friendly fire) damage.
To hell with guns. Give’m nukes. Anyway, education is a damn liberal institution…close the schools!
#14 – hemidactylus
Great point that nobody’s talking about! And who will pay for all those guns, the ammo and the training? The fuckingly stupid U.S. taxpayer.
Maybe the NRA should go public: an IPO would make LaPierre and his minions billionaires overnight. Isn’t that what capitalism’s all about?
The NRA are shameless enablers of violent merciless bloodshed. And they have legislative marionettes. We need another Black Lives Matter sort of concerted action from high school students nationwide to shame these bastards into surrender!
Strangely there exists on the fringes of the wacky religious right a voice of reason? I realize Mehta may not be very popular in these parts but:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2018/02/20/pat-robertson-calls-for-a-ban-on-assault-weapons-its-sensible/
Brain freeze. Owwww!!!!
hemidactylus @13:
Don’t have the exact figures, but I’ve seen them, and after the election of Obama, gun and ammunition sales in the US skyrocketed and stayed high for all eight years of his presidency. Gun stores openly advertised using signs reading “get your guns before Obama bans them all.”
The day after Trump was elected, gun sales had their biggest slump in a decade and gun stores and manufacturers have been struggling to find a new way to get people back to buying now that there isn’t a liberal president and Congress to scare them with.
Wait am I the only one not bothered by the bullets on the floor or the guns on the desk, but, why in the world does the kid have an eraser on his head?
Not even bears, really. .223 mostly irritates bears.
If only there had been a good guy with a gun at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This whole thing could have been avoided. Oh wait, there was one.
@18 Well bugger me ,never thought i would see the day when Mr Robinson would say something sensible .
They’re just lucky that so much in manufacturing is automated by now. Imagine if they had to educate people in how to actually produce guns? Or design them? In fact, hundreds of years from now, the AR-15 will still be largely unchanged, while the rest of the world has switched over to phasers and railguns.
Curious that the armed policeman, who presumably is very used to toting a gun, who was assigned to protect the school in Florida decided to stay outside.
However it appears that teachers will be able to clinically take down some crazed lunatic with nary a second thought.
@ blf #2
A common – and justified – criticism of Norman Rockwell’s earlier works, of which this picture is an obvious call-out. A good number of minorities fell out of Rockwell’s pictures, during his time at the Saturday Evening Post.
I like to think that it was more a case of social myopia than outright malice, in Rockwell’s case. Also, a big case of editorial meddling. Once he got out of the Saturday Evening Post, he started producing a lot more social-issue oriented portraits.
Because of his previous “sanitized”, feel-good works, his later portraits are more powerful in their representations of social or political issues.
The one which really wrenched my guts was “The Problem We All Live With”, which I discovered in a art book about Norman Rockwell. The accompanying text was an interview of Rockwell, and on how he was flabbergasted – and horrified – that hundreds of adults will drop everything else and come everyday so they can yell at, threaten and throw things at a 6-year old schoolgirl, only because she is Black.
I just can’t even imagine that it’s like to live like that.
Fifty years later, their are still too many people like that, and not just in the US.
blf Waaaaay back at #2
“I note none of the people pictured are guilty of Education whilst Black.”
At least the target is a token black!
Athaic@26, Thanks for the synopsis of Norman Rockwell’s “social myopia”, and for that matter, confirming my (unstated) hunch the underlying picture is a Rockwell (it’s not one I recognize, but certainly seems to be his style & typical(?) subject matter). Yes, the 1964 The Problem We All Live With is also the one I immediately think of when Rockwell’s work and civil rights are mentioned.
One kid in the painting has an eraser on his head to keep him still in his seat. He was fidgeting, probably, and “sit still” commands did not work. Considering the old fashioned nature of the scene, the student might also have been failing to “sit up straight.” At least the teach didn’t shoot him.
Oh, it gets better. The proposal I heard was for the NRA to teach a class especially for teachers–for a nominal fee, of course.
I’m tempted to suggest the live ammunition practice use the instructor as the target, but besides being completely unethical, any instructor with brains would teach how to miss, thereby further increasing the extreme risk to students, other teachers, and the class goldfish as the armed teacher follows their training and fails to hit the actual threat.