Posted on 10/17/2006 7:33:46 AM PDT by Hadean
Clark Aposhian is running his first gun training class exclusively for teachers. Although turnout was sparse, the pupils were enthusiastic.
"We stick our heads in the sand when it comes to ability to protect ourselves," Aposhian told The Early Show correspondent Hattie Kauffman.
Holes in student safety were brought to the forefront after three fatal school shootings in the past few weeks. The deadliest was at the one-room Amish school house in Pennsylvania, where five school girls were killed.
The teachers in Aposhian's class are training to get licensed to carry a gun to school. They feel having a gun in the classroom will help them should a threat arise.
"If someone's going to get into this school and harm the kids, there needs to be an immediate and deadly response," said Nick Pond, a teacher. "That could be an amazing deterrence to anyone who wants to harm kids."
"When I walk in there, that class is mine and I would do anything to keep from one of those children getting armed," teacher David Westley said.
Aposhian said that experience has taught us that having unarmed teachers has not produced good results.
"We'll never know if in Baley or Pennsylvania or Red Lake, Minn., if a firearm discreetly carried by a teacher or an administrator or custodian would have stopped these shootings, if it would have saved any lives at all," he said. "However, we can tell you with absolute certainty what happened when no firearms were carried by teachers."
President of the Utah Education Association Kim Campbell is critical of having armed teachers. She said she cannot think of any circumstance where teachers should carry guns in school.
"I would be opposed to any guns in school, period," she said. "No matter where I would put a gun in a classroom, a class full of little people would find it. And if it were locked up safely, there would be no chance to get it."
Others say that while guns may not be the answer, kids and teachers need to fight back even if it's with pens, pencils and textbooks. Greg Crane, a former police officer, teaches a class on how students and teachers can defend against an attack with his program called Response Options. He tells his students to use everything they have available to fight back.
"We train that anything is a distraction," he said. "Anything that you can throw. Your movement, your noise. We need to get out of this victim mindset. We need to get out of the belief that just because he has the gun and I don't, doesn't mean I have lost."
Obviously she hasn't been paying attention. (Colorado, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc.)
GOOD!
How bout on your hip?
In one of those cases, a teacher ran to the parking lot to get a gun out of his car, then he stopped the perp. Good job, but would have been quicker if he were carrying.
"Obviously she hasn't been paying attention."
Very typical behavior of people who are liberals.
Armed or harmed sir?
Never bring "pens, pencils and textbooks" to a gunfight.
Can you imagine thinking about your kid having to defend himself/herself with a pen just because some wackos want zero guns in school? This is a case where the pen is NOT mightier than the sword.
Well, it's about FRIGGIN' time.
Perhaps the rule should limit carrying to either administrators, or to teachers while they are not actually in a class, but rather have office time, etc. I could just see a scenario where some kid grabs that gun from a teacher....
I'm sure he meant harmed. I wonder if some cutie at the CBS wesite changed the word. "Oh, just a mistake!"
That's what I was thinking.... 1 letter and the entire meaning of the sentence changes.
I think the key is found in the following quote:
"We'll never know if in Baley or Pennsylvania or Red Lake, Minn., if a firearm discreetly carried by a teacher or an administrator or custodian would have stopped these shootings, if it would have saved any lives at all," he said. "However, we can tell you with absolute certainty what happened when no firearms were carried by teachers."This would work best when neither students nor potential perps know which teachers, administrators, or janitors are armed. It goes without saying the the gun should never be left unattended or where students could get their hands on the gun.
How about if the teachers defend themselves with bananas?
Apologies to Monty Python.
"We'll never know if in Baley or Pennsylvania or Red Lake, Minn., if a firearm discreetly carried by a teacher or an administrator or custodian would have stopped these shootings, if it would have saved any lives at all," he said. "However, we can tell you with absolute certainty what happened when no firearms were carried by teachers."
Don't clear the muddied waters with thought and logic ... irrefutable reality fact.
(I can't think of anymore words to cram into that phrase ... or I would)
I really bothers me to see those 'no guns' signs on the school doors. How about changing them to, "This school is a Safe Zone for armed felons!"?
I wonder if the school board has signs on their houses: "The occupants of this house are unarmed and there is no alarm system on this house."
While I'm not opposed to arming school personnel, there are plenty of teachers who should NOT be allowed to carry a firearm.
I would guess that most teachers are level headed enough to safely carry a gun. However, I know quite a few teachers who are not emotionally stable enough to carry.
> 20 books/pencils/backpacks/purses thrown at an invader followed by a dozen students and a teacher dogpiling them will bring down just about anyone. <
Absolutely!
And the students should also be trained to HOLLER and SCREAM like hell -- all the while throwing every pen, shoe, set of keys, computer monitor and anything else at the perp. All distractions should help, no matter how small.
What's more, everybody in the room needs to MOVE as much and as fast as possible, in every imaginable direction, up and down as well as sideways.
Perhaps what the pacificists on this thread don't realize is that it's hard enough to shoot accurately when the target is standing still -- and probably ten times more difficult when the target is moving rapidly.
Add the problem of moving targets to the chaos caused by a hail of thrown objects plus an ungodly cacaphony of noise -- and I think you'll reduce the shooter's accuracy to near the vanishing point.
> I wonder if the school board has signs on their houses: "The occupants of this house are unarmed ..." <
I'll go you one farther:
Let's REQUIRE that sign on the front of the house for anybody who has contributed to the Brady campaign.
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