Posted on 12/19/2012 7:45:15 AM PST by marktwain
Not completely unexpected, Governor Bob McDonnell's comment yesterday that maybe it is time for a discussion about arming some school officials is drawing fire from the predictable quarters:
Sen. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, Democratic caucus chairman, said, “The governor should know better than to suggest that arming citizens will solve anything.“Maybe the governor should focus on solutions that could actually have an impact, like banning the high-capacity magazines used to inflict horrific violence upon countless American cities.”
The Virginia Education Association had a more measured response:
Meg Gruber, president of the Virginia Education Association, the state’s teachers union, said Tuesday that “In the aftermath of last week’s tragic events, we need to give careful consideration to measures to keep students safe.”
The Governor for his part made sense when he asked this rhetorical question:
“If a person like that was armed and trained could they have stopped the carnage in the classroom? Perhaps.”
In April 2011, Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli ruled that carrying a firearm for self-protection in a church or place of worship is permissible under Virginia law. He was responding to a state legislator’s request to explain a state law which bars firearms in places of worship “without good and sufficient reason” Cuccinelli ruled that “carrying a weapon for personal protection constitutes a good and sufficient reason.”
So I believe you can have a gun in church.
I always was uncomfortable with the state setting a hard-and-fast rule about a church. I would have preferred the law provide that each individual church was ALLOWED to ban guns if they so chose, rather than telling them.
But that is moot with the interpretation of the Attorney General.
BTW, Ken (the Attorney General) in that ruling also said that churches could ban weapons. I forgot to mention that in my first post.
His ruling is about where I thought the law should have been anyway.
Every nutty person can get a weapon.
The issue is whether having the gun present within the school property would increase the chance of the nutty person showing up at work with a weapon.
Since it would be likely that those teachers trained to carry weapons would be teachers who owned weapons already, those teachers, should they become “nutty”, would have already had access to weapons, so the only difference is whether they have to smuggle their weapon into school, or whether they could openly have their weapon in the school. Given that it is trivial for a teacher to carry anything they want into a school, I argue there is no increased risk if they have the weapons already. This assumes training included how to properly store the weapon in a safe and secure manner.
There is of course the increased risk that the gun will be improperly stored, and therefore accessible by someone who immediately goes crazy while at school, but who would otherwise not have access to a gun. That risk seems extremely low. It might not be lower than the risk of a shooting — but the risk of a shooting is extremely low, and by that standard we should do NOTHING.
Our problem is that, regardless of the extremely low risk of your child being shot at school, the masses feel compelled to act to do SOMETHING to mitigate the risk. None of the gun control suggestions would do anything to lower the risk, certainly not in any measurable way.
BTW, part of the reason for that is you can’t really MEASURE the risk, because it is so low that it is in the noise. I can give you a percentage each year of mass murders in schools, but if you plot it yearly, the graph is random; it’s not a statistical event, it is an extraordinary event. You could ban every gun, confiscate all but 1000 of them, and you’d still have more guns not confiscated than there have been guns used in mass murders.
And of course, nobody is proposing a law to confiscate all weapons; nor would such a law be useful. If you banned the manufacture and sale of every gun, it would be decades before it made an appreciable dent in the number of weapons, since they last forever.
Banning bullets would be more effective, but there are still more than enough bullets manufactured to kill every person in our country multiple times over. And since the police would still need bullets, there would be an easy supply for criminals.
I don’t think we should allow every school employee to bring guns. I would envision a special program, like what the airline pilots had, to train and test people for the job.
But if we had such a program, I would feel confident in saying that the chances of one of our armed teachers going nutty is less than the chance of one of our armed police officers going nutty.
(I speak of schools like all the ones where mass killings have taken place — I understand a small number of schools have metal detectors and such).
Thank you so much for the better info...clears things up...my approach is if you don’t ask, they can’t say no!
Merry Christmas!
I do agree there should be thorough discussions about mass killings. Knowing that there is a gun inside the school could be deterrent to some but it really goes to the motivation of the perpetrator. There are the ‘death by cop’ mindset types.
But it’s not only guns. School bus drivers could run off the cliff. Food employees could poison. It’s what do we do about those who find some vindication or pleasure in killing others. What the sane would call abnormal.
Your point on the statistical rarity is a good one. It invites a choice of what society can ‘live with’ or what society much ‘deal with’.
“Anyone can kill a lot of unarmed adults and helpless small children with a ball bat in 20 minutes”
CNN misreporting again. Actual response time was closer to 7-8 minutes or less.
Here is a transcript of the 911 calls of the Connecticut shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school.
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0935 Sandy Hook School. Caller is indicating she thinks there’s someone shooting in the building.
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0936 Units responding at Sandy Hook School. The front glass has been broken. We’re unsure why.
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0937 All units, the individual I have on the phone is continuing to hear what he believes to be gunfire.
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0938 All units responding to Sandy Hook School at this time. The shooting appears to have stopped. The school is in lockdown.
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0940 I will need two ambulances at this time.
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0940 The shooter is apparently still shooting in the office area.
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0941 Take exit 10... continue on Riverside Road, Dickerson Drive. Make sure you have your vest on.
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0942 Last known shots were in the front of the (inaudible)
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0943 We have one fatal in room one... (inaudible) received a wound to the foot...
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0946 I got bodies here.
post 17 at the link:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2969992/posts
Correction noted. At 30 seconds of beating per helpless victim, that gives us “only” about 14 dead in 7 minutes. Still horrible.
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