Well that was a bitch slapping. Who pissed in your Cheerios?

Can you see, in your example, a reduced opportunity?

If the ‘good guy with a gun’, that’s so often vaunted as the only solution to a ‘bad guy with a gun’, can become the bad guy - doesn’t that invalidate the NRA’s most frequent and glib argument against gun control?

Even GQ -- through the Guardian (USA) newspaper and its US-based gun policy expert -- has found the truth of things:

What Conservatives Get Right About Guns

1. Banning assault weapons would do almost nothing (only 3.6 percent of America's gun murders are committed with any kind of a rifle). Even the Democratic writers of the 1994 federal assault weapon ban knew it was a largely symbolic policy meant to demonstrate that they were Doing Something Official-Looking.

2. Owning 17 guns isn't really that extreme. Just 3% of American adults own half the country's guns, an average of 17 of them each. "To a non-gun owner, this might sound like a lot. But you have to think of guns as tools: a few different rifles for hunting different kinds of game, plus a shotgun, a handgun or two for self-protection, and some antique guns inherited from your grandfather. It adds up fast.

As one gun rights activist put it, “Why do you need more than one pair of shoes? The truth is, you don’t, but do you want more than one pair of shoes? If you’re going hiking, you don’t want to use that one pair of high heels.”

3. Only a tiny fraction of America's guns are used in crimes. As it turns out, "fewer than 1% of the country's guns are used in recorded crime or violence each year."

4. Gun crime dropped even as Americans bought more firearms. Gun murders have dropped by about 50% since the early 1990s. Over that same time period, Americans bought an estimated 70 million more guns. This doesn't prove that "more guns equal less crime," because the reasons for the spike in murders and then its subsequent decline are complex and the relationship between America's gun ownership and a drop in gun murders is more than just a simple correlation.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I'd like to see Lapiere or loesch in that situation....heckuva job nra

It's every male fantasy to rush in with a gun to save the day.

Even though basic emergency medical training is far more likely to save lives.

I guess it's easier to buy a gun than to learn a real useful skill.

You bet. I think your other point is that Hinckley did not use an assault rifle. He did not use an automatic weapon. He did not even use a semi-auto weapon. Hinckley used a 6-shot .22 revolver and was able to fire all 6 rounds in 1.7 seconds. Another fun fact is that Hinckley never hit Reagan with a direct shot. The 6th round ricocheted off the armored limo and struck Reagan.

I'm glad you raised these important points.

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

Let's be honest about who these guys are. Peterson was hired onto the Sheriff's office in '85. He served 6 years before he was transferred into the school resource officer program in '91. He's been an SRO for the nearly 30 years since. My guess is he was mostly trained for dealing with basic student/school/community liaison issues, and only recently probably started getting refresher training on dealing with active shooter incidents.

He probably didn't take the job looking to be involved in tactical engagements with shooters; in fact he may have moved into SRO specifically to avoid that kind of thing.

I'm not defending his actions in this incident, because he is a sworn law enforcement officer, was armed, and it appears that their policies should have led him to engage with the shooter, but let's not misunderstand this situation as if Peterson was a SWAT guy who was hired specifically to deal with active shooter situations. He was a regular cop who was likely hired to deal with things like pot in school lockers, and fist fights in the cafeteria.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Exactly.

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

I'm going to assume (for the moment) that there is a sufficient kind and amount of training such that a 'selectable' person off the street could take such training, be a school resource person, and then if a shooting does occur, they would immediately respond in the correct manner.
If the above is true, then Peterson did not receive the sufficient training.
If the above assumption is not true, then armed guards will not work.
Re arming teachers - - - people who want to teach may not fall also fall in the 'selectable' set of people who are capable of being trained as armed guards.
IOW, there's a set of people who want to be teachers, and there's a set of people capable of being trained as effective armed guards - - - is there sufficient overlap of these sets for this plan to work. I doubt it.

In general, I doubt it as well.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

It's an absurd idea on its face. I can't believe it's even being talked about by people in charge of things.

A trained, vetted, armed civilian volunteer program, as I suggested in the OP, is the only avenue worth pursuing, if we're looking to weaponize our schools' defenses without installing police officers everywhere.

It should be a community-based decision, and they should be allowed to choose it, or not.

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The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own - W

I like this idea. Where I live, there are no professional firefighters, it's 100% volunteer. Those guys take it seriously and train hard with nothing other than perhaps camaraderie and respect from the community to show for their actions. I think a similar idea could be done with civilian defense and crisis response.

You mean like a well regulated militia?

George Zimmerman - these are the kind of folks who would volunteer for this - total nonsense.

There's a reason you know Zimmerman's name.

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The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own - W

1. Banning assault weapons would do almost nothing (only 3.6 percent of America's gun murders are committed with any kind of a rifle).

I'm sure the families of the 17 people at killed at Parkland, 58 killed in Vegas, and 26 killed in the Texas Church will find solace that their loved ones kind of hit the lottery.

For arguments sake, just pretend you can partially see the future 100 years from now.

You have a 50% chance of either of these next two scenarios occurring and its either #1 or #2:

1. All guns are banned in the USA and life goes on pretty normal and becomes the liberal utopia ya'll want.
2. All guns are banned in the USA and a party takes control of all levels of government and starts to kill civilians that protest, riot........ just don't conform.

This might be a stupid, f'ing example BUT its not out of the realm of possibility.

So back to now, there is a vote to disarm all civilians which would you choose?

What makes you think (A) I'm a liberal or (B) I want all guns banned?

I do agree that's a stupid f'ing example though.

Not sure where you were going with that, so feel free to elaborate.

Nn that note, even if we look at just the murder rate, the US is the worst developed country in the world at 4.88/100,000 ranking 126th out of ~200ish countries. Most of West, South, and Northern Europe of murder rates at 1/8th to 1/4th of the US.

You're a smart and honest guy, so I'm genuinely interested in your perspective on this. I'm a gun owner, but have a hard time dismissing those numbers. How do they look if we, say, control for gang violence, poverty, etc.?

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

 "...........volunteer concealed-carrying local residents providing security at your child's school?"



No, I don't want George Zimmerman patrolling the local school looking for hooded thugs to shoot.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

You are half right about that.

OK, he's off the list. Best I can tell, I think that leaves about 133 million other possible people to choose from. I think we're still good if we need qualified candidates.

I like you. You've got good horse sense. We need more people like you making decisions.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

To be honest, I'm not totally sure where I was going with some of that myself... :)

But, if you look at the rest of the discussion between me and oldandslow, he posted a really good link to an article in the Guardian that showed how gun homicides are really quite concentrated in this country: https://www.theguardian.com/...-violence-in-America

The fact is, the majority of gun violence in this country is concentrated in very small areas, even within violence prone cities. Chicago has a horrendous murder problem, but only in small areas; most of the city is quite safe. According to the article 50% of the gun homicides occur in areas with around 25% of the population. I haven't done any checking to see what happens to the US murder rate if you subtract that from the overall, but it has to make a dent.

The other point you bring up is poverty, which I'm sure correlates to gun homicides, but I don't think it's causal. The book "Ghettoside" is very illuminating; a lot of black on black homicide (at least in LA in the time period that was scrutinized) was driven largely by the fact that the vast majority of black on black on homicides went unsolved (due to understaffed and under resourced homicide departments) and unpunished, leading to a cycle of violence as communities determined that if justice was to be done, they had to handle it themselves. This fed on itself as people became increasingly distrustful of police due to their seeming lack of concern of black on black crime, which led to almost no cooperation with police, which led to a further decreased ability to catch perpetrators...a vicious cycle of violence that spiraled out of control.

Interestingly, though, it appears that NYC has hit upon a successful strategy of community policing that aims to build trust between the police and those they serve: https://www.nytimes.com/...city-crime-2017.html (although the article does state that some criminologists don't think that the changes are what's driving the decline). But, for some reason, NYC has drastically reduced the number of murders....286 for 2017, as opposed to 650 for Chicago. Certainly, there is something going on in NYC that perhaps could be replicated in other violence prone communities.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.