State of Play
Others have commented on the police response in Uvalde, but I have not. I have been waiting for facts, but there have been so few up to this point. We know a few things. First, we know that the shooter went in through a back door, we know parents begged officers to go in, and we know they did not go in for over an hour. We should probably take each of those points one at a time because each has been a huge part of this story. It was initially reported that the shooter went through a door that had been propped open by a rock. As it turned out, she closed the door and naturally assumed it was locked to those outside. Apparently, it wasn’t.
As an aside, I went through this exercise with our daughter. We had her mentally track how many doors students could legally enter at her school and settled on four. We then asked her how many total points of entry there were and settled on fourteen. Keep in mind that there are around 130,000 documented schools in the United States. That’s not counting universities and community colleges. Could you imagine the expense and manpower it would take to guard each of those doors (even just the legal ones) and to secure the rest?
Let’s pretend that your junior highs and high schools have two points of entry and exit and all the rest are successfully locked down. Let’s go with what Ted Cruz suggested and have one point of entry at the elementary schools. Mind you, this would violate fire code and present other possible dangers, but can you imagine the manpower we are talking to have an armed guard at each of those doors? We are talking about over 200,000 people.
The second fact we know is that parents begged to save their children and cops refused. Did they do the right thing? I obviously wasn’t there, haven’t had any combat training, and certainly haven’t game played through any hostage negotiations. Would there have been more dead had the police breached the school and engaged the shooter sooner? Would they have saved more lives doing that? We will never know on both counts.
What is true in this light is how absurd an idea it is to arm teachers. I can count far too many reasons why this is an absolutely horrible idea. Let’s assume that the teacher is trained to fire their weapon as those on the right have suggested. That alleviates only one concern. The second concern would be storage of the weapon. Do you want them to store it on their person or keep it secured somewhere in their classroom? What happens if they or that location is compromised?
Then we move onto the actual gaming of the mass shooter scenario. They may be trained to shoot, but are they trained in that specific scenario? What does SWAT do when they see an armed intruder AND armed teachers? What happens if a teacher has a mental breakdown and become the shooter themselves? Even in the best of cases we encountered a situation where trained police felt powerless to do anything. Whether they were negligent or justified is important but also very telling when you consider what you are asking untrained teachers to do.
There is always a non-zero chance the worst will occur and there always will be a non-zero chance no matter what we do. We start with the most obvious thing and move are way down from there. Restricting the gun is the most obvious thing. Door control, armed teachers, and armed soldiers sounds lovely but ultimately ineffective without doing the obvious thing.
It makes me wonder what could have been accomplished had Abbott used the 1.5 – 2.0 billion dollars he wasted at the border?
Of course, letting 18 tear olds but assault weapons through the mail negates a lot of planning.
1They want to arm teachers, but how effective would that be if the shooter is wearing tactical gear?
2TexasTrailerParkTrash @ 1,
May I add that a teacher with a pistol is no match in a gun fight with a shooter with an assault weapon.
Years ago when I was a public school teacher, the classroom doors in the building could not be locked from the inside and only a janitor or admin had a key to lock doors from the outside. Went through one emergency when they thought we had a shooter (thank God we didn’t) on campus. It still makes me shudder to think how bad it could have ended.
However, assault rifles and automatic weapons need to be outlawed. But this is as likely to happen as glaciers in hell.
3Papa @2—Absolutely. Assault weapons have become the 800 pound gorilla in the room that the GOP will do anything to ignore. “Doors kill people, not assault rifles.”
4In this age of technology, if politicians would put their heads together, doors could be monitored, unlocked or locked remotely, people buzzed in like my office 20 years ago, etc. Not rocket science but repugnanticans are only concerned about pissing off their base by doing the obvious. Weapons of mass destruction and high capacity magazines should be banned altogether, but that’ll never be done. They won’t even expand licensing requirements, background checks, red flag procedures, age restrictions. Nope, won’t even mention guns when talking about doing something about mass shooter incidents. Won’t be long until another mass shooting with an assault rifle will happen- school, mall, store, hospital, planned parenthood clinic, you name it.
5There are 130,000 public K-12 schools. the last high school I visited for a speech tournament had one large building, 8 temporary classrooms, and a standalone building out by their baseball/football field.
Probably another 15,000 private K-12 institutions. Who knows how many day-care, and pre-care facilities (including my neighbor’s house).
U.S. Department of Education tallies nearly 4,000 colleges and universities. MANY have unconnected buildings — the school I attended for my undergrad education now has about 16,000 students, 15,000 faculty and staff, and 200 different buildings scattered over an almost 800-acre campus.
“hardening” those facilities is a near impossible task (especially my neighbor’s house).
6My reality was feeling safe going to school. I was bullied. I had fantasies of making the bully feel my rage and my fantasies were of humiliating them not killing them. Where have people gotten the thought that just killing someone, another person, human being, is the answer? What do you do when your kids aren’t playing nice, you take away the toy. Time to take away the repunations toy.
7Didn’t take long. Another mass shooting in Texas near San Antonio using an assault rifle today. Kids and a grandfather killed.
8Centerville is the exact midpoint between Dallas and Houston. Not that it matters any. There’s more than one of these a day.
9Imagined timeline:
Gunman enters school.
Teachers take students to a secure location and make certain they are safe and understand procedure
Teachers retrieve gun from secure location
Teachers position themselves in a place to protect the students, or in a hidden sniper-like location.
Or:
Call 911
If there’s a police cruiser within a mile or two of the school, it might take about the same amount of time for an officer to arrive. A fully weapons trained police officer.
10To peel back the curtain a little, now we are being instructed to react on a case by case basis. If the gunman(men) are on the other side of campus and we can safely evacuate we do so. Otherwise, we barricade the door as best we can. We also arm ourselves with anything to hurl at the gunman if he is able to breech the doorway.
What sucks about the response is that we were told that shooters and we know police will arrive in about 15 minutes. So, he will look for low hanging fruit, so if you make it difficult for him he will go to a different area where he can kill people easier.
However, if he knows he’s got you for over an hour then he can wait you out. Again, I don’t know if they just froze, if that was purposeful and intended, or if they just didn’t care. The longer they wait to cooperate the worse it looks.
11Sorry Rick but the texastan shooting shows how well we can count on cops doing anything useful. But your list also shows that the teach will be long dead before she gets her gun. But the other problem is that most people DO NOT have the will to shoot people. The good guy with the gun hero is mostly myth. Bullet-proof backpack, use as shield, fall to ground and play dead, wait. Is a useful option, and practice that. Depending on others is a fairy tale!
12None of the conservative arguments are meant to make sense.
Doors
Abortion
Video games
Single mothers
Arming teachers
Arming volunteers
Moats with sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads.
None of it matters. If they get you arguing about why their stupid idea is bad, then you aren’t talking about guns and why the Child Murder Party continues to oppose all regulations.
That’s what they want. The response is always: That is a lie, now let’s get back to child murder. And by the way, you never say Black people should be armed, so we can talk about your racism too.
13Regarding John in Denver’s explanation at #5:
When you’re explaining, you’re losing. Politics is about harnessing emotions of the voters to get them to vote for you. Republicans excel at that.
Even if Republicans were willing to pay for that (narrator, they are not, it’s another bad faith argument), it doesn’t do anything for mass-murders in theatres, hospitals, parking lots, malls, outdoor concerts, indoor concerts, or any other place people gather to be mass-murdered.
The correct response is simply call them a liar, then go right back to asking why they support murder with their policies. When a conservative deflects a question, the next question should be the same one. Do not let a conservative off the hook to deflect and lie. Be like the people at Chuck Grassley’s town hall. Make shaming conservatives in public great again.
14Beau of the Fifth Column, on YouTube, had an excellent post a couple of days ago, on the stupidity of the idea of arming teachers to protect students. It’s definitely worth watching.
15thatotherjean, I’m not sure if this is the one you’re talking about, but it’s a helluvan interesting take on things that I hadn’t considered.
16https://youtu.be/5nT6LHDMO70
Ah, that’s why all us losers will die poor and powerless. “Could you imagine the expense and manpower it would take to guard each of those doors (even just the legal ones) and to secure the rest?”
You can bet that Eric Prince and the company formerly known as Blackwater have a multi-billion dollar contract ready to go as soon as Republicans take over again. They’ll put some minimum wage slob at the door with a uniform and an AR-15. Training them will be easy: Prince et al will have them watch a 20 minute video “How to Use Your New Rifle”. The gun lobby’s fund-raising arm (also known as the NRA) will go bonkers at the thought of the vast numbers of guns and “tactical gear” they get to sell.
It won’t do diddly squat to secure schools or help children. Probably the next batch of nutcases with guns will be those disgruntled minimum wage guards. But who cares, there’s gold in them thar hills!
17Some day I can make a lengthier post about why I do what I do. For now, suffice it to say that I actually enjoy teaching adolescents. I even volunteer my time to do it for free at our church. I’ve taught at suburban schools and inner city schools. I taught at a Catholic school for a year. At no point did I ever feel threatened by the kids. Never. Some of those schools would resemble the ones we see in the movies like The Substitute or Dangerous Minds. They are never as extreme as we see in films or television.
Kids are kids. They are kids in suburbia. They are kids in urban schools. They are kids in rural schools. They have good days and bad days. Some have to cope with a lot of extra stuff going on in their lives. Some cope better than others. This is life. In 24 years kids haven’t changed much. Life has changed around them. Parents have changed. Administrators have changed. Teachers have changed. The community around us has changed. The kids have not changed.
I didn’t become an assistant principal for a reason. I went the counseling route for a reason. It’s the same reason I did not become a soldier or a policeman. I love working with people. I can’t do it on an adversarial role. It’s just not how I’m wired. I have a helper personality. It’s just the way I am. If you ask me to play soldier/cop at work I can’t do it. I just can’t.
18If you can not even trust the Police Chief to act how could you possibly expect a Teacher with little training to respond? They steal from Education, Teachers are over worked, underpaid now!
As long as people continue to vote for imbeciles like Abbott, Cruz, and in my state, DeWine, who has a list of lies, broken promises and corruption going back to 1974 when we went from first in wages to the bottom.
They steal from Public Education, accept bribes from Utility companies, passing the costs on to consumers, gerrymander maps , ignore the state Supreme Court until they find a corrupt Federal Judge!
It is not just Texas.
Cruz simple minded one door is totally ignorant. Has he ever seen a Fire Drill? Imagine getting students from all over out one door? As a Teacher you understand that.
19The fire drill is the easy problem to spot. However, let’s consider a sudden thunderstorm during recess. Kids would have to traipse around to the front getting drenched and possibly struck by lightening in the process.
The bigger problem with guns for teachers is that we don’t have the same immunity as cops. If a teacher freezes and has been bestowed with that responsibility then they could easily be sued. As it stands, we are saddled with the responsibility of choosing a reaction in a shooter scenario. Should we evacuate, hide, or hunker down? Getting 25-30 kids out is a daunting task. Do we try knowing the gunman may have moved closer? What happens when the kids scatter? Is that our legal responsibility? Will a parent in their grief blame us for a bad call?
I think there are common sense changes you can make in schools to mitigate the effects of a mass shooter but nothing is perfect. Our doors open with our ID badge at our campus. So there’s no need to prop a door open and they automatically lock behind us. You could install metal detectors in the doors as that tech is available and appears unobtrusive. However, in 130,000 schools who is going to foot that bill?
I’ve said it once (actually more often) and I’ll say it again. You can do both gun legislation and securing buildings but that’s just schools. You have stores, malls, movie theaters, and numerous other public buildings where this tech isn’t there yet. You want armed soldiers at all of those places too? We could be looking at a million points of entry or more.
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