Posted on 04/19/2009 4:39:26 PM PDT by Pontiac
Ten years ago, Paul Lombardo was teaching at Eastlake Middle School.
Like any other teacher, student or administrator who walked into a school on April 20, 1999, Lombardo had no idea that the day's events would forever change how safety was viewed at public schools across the country.
That day two students walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and proceeded to shoot and kill 12 of their classmates and one teacher before killing themselves.
"Ten years ago, or even throughout my whole life, if you had told me that was going to happen in my lifetime or that I would be affected by it personally, I wouldn't have believed you," Lombardo said.
Ten years ago, Meri Consolo, Lauren Allen and Christian Kissig were all in second grade and no older than 8.
But on Sept. 2, 2008, these three high school seniors found themselves and 10 of their classmates huddled in the corner of van Heeckeren's classroom as a teenage gunman roamed the halls of South High.
"I guess you could say it was an eye opener for all schools. It's not on the news as much as it used to be, but it can happen anywhere," she said. "I never thought it would happen here, but Columbine taught a lot of schools a lot of things about what can be done to protect the safety of students."
"Because of what has happened in the last 10 years, just with society, it has brought to light that we have to make sure we're prepared for anything that might happen," Lombardo said.
"For those who say it can't happen here ... We now say it can happen here and we need to be prepared."
(Excerpt) Read more at news-herald.com ...
The entire system fell apart and was broke then, and it is in much worse shape today.
The sad thing is, unless we decide to allow children to carry guns to school, schools will always be places where the vast majority of people will be unarmed and defenseless. Even if we allow administrators and teachers to have concealed-carry, I’d say only two or three teachers and administrators in my 7-12 grade high school were the type who might possibly carry a concealed weapon, and this is in a rural, rather conservative school district (as in, there are back roads you can drive down and see houses with huge confederate flags flying). So, even if everyone with both the ability and inclination to use and carry a gun did, it still wouldn’t be much different than having to ‘shoot a cop or two’ and that’s assuming the gunman doesn’t go to the school or hasn’t suddenly developed amnesia or otherwise somehow doesn’t know which teachers would be defenseless and which would (or actually do) have concealed weapons.
So, that said, the problem here is not limited to whether or not the teachers are allowed to carry guns, but it extends into whether or not the teachers would actually carry the guns. Allowing people to have CCW’s in certain places won’t do a bit of good unless someone actually takes the initiative to HAVE a CCW in those place. Granted, there are still situations where many people who, even if they wanted to have a CCW still shouldn’t for safety reasons or wouldn’t for practicality that will still amount to ‘free-fire zones’, but if people are allowed to carry and start to do so, they’ll be relatively few and far between.
Take God out of the classroom, and replace the patriot's gun with the abortionist's scalpel, and it's no wonder we continue to see more events like the Columbine shooting.
I wish I could agree with this but I can’t.
The children is today’s America are not self disciplined enough (in general) to be trusted to carry firearms except under constant supervision.
Today’s children are in general an unrulely mess who do not respect their parents or their elders.
Unfortunately divorce, two working parent families, mass entertainment that denigrates fathers has so degraded children’s mental picture of parental authority that our society’s children’s social structure has degraded to the level of “Lord of the Flies”.
No until we have reestablished the sovereignty of the family I don’t think we can again trust children with firearms unless they are under constant adult supervision.
Certain major cities excepted (unfortunately).
CO has a demdum gov. now, and Denver as a demdum Mayor.
The Sec. of Interior, Salazar is shutting down the exploring drilling sites so you can be sure the CO will be bluer than blue before too long.
Very sad.
Well, even in this ideal society you dream of (in which case, our children wouldn’t need to carry weapons to school to defend themselves against psychotic mass murderers in the first place), there’d still be a lower limit where the children are simply not strong enough to deal with the recoil of anything large enough to stop a gunman, or not experienced enough to shoot accurately, or whatever. Even if you look at history, although teenagers may have carried weapons and fought in battles and such with great frequency, they were considered adult members of society at those times, and actual children weren’t allowed to do such things.
Plus, I was using schools as an example to make the point that there will always still be places (hospitals, adult daycares, mental health institutions, laboratories, YMCA’s, etc) that there are either safety considerations or other practical reasons that would cause people to not carry their weapons.
But, the problems go deeper than how our children are allowed to behave. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with both parents working if that’s what’s needed to pay the bills, or the children aren’t really affected - in most cases, if a couple just wants something that’s too expensive, the non-working spouse doesn’t go out and get a job, they go out and get a new credit card instead. Mass entertainment that makes fun of fathers only succeeds because society (including the people it makes fun of) tunes in or buys tickets - if nobody watched, they’d catch on pretty quick that they should do something else cause money talks in Hollywood. Children can’t be expected to respect their parents if their parents waste hours a day chatting to cute guys they meet on Myspace and feeding their WoW addiction and quitting one ‘boring’ or ‘annoying’ job after another and in general acting like they’re 14 while their teenagers are getting their own steady jobs and paying for their own rent and groceries and such... let’s say that the ‘Soveirgnty of the family’ has suffered because personal responsibility has suffered and adults are no longer acting like adults ought to.
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