To the nay-sayers of putting armed guards or teachers in schools, I'll point out that as a part of the original Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (which included the original and ineffective AWB) put forward enough funds to put 100,000 police officers on the streets and, in fact, is what started allowing armed police in schools and that actually did have an impact on violent crimes in and around schools.
And on the flip-side, it also eliminated the ability of prison inmates to get Pell Grants for higher education, because who gives a shit about rehabilitating our inmates and making sure they have the education they need to make a better life for themselves once they're released, right?
Side note:
Thank you Damen for your thoughts on long rage firing, I appreciate the thoroughness. Considering what he was carrying, Neil Gardner would probably have had a difficult time landing an accurate shot as you stated, but suffice it to say there is a distinct lack (at least from what I've seen) of evidence he was compromised by his missing glasses.
No problem, Jazzy. In that specific event, I think there's more evidence that his biggest handicap was the weapon he was using (a pistol) than anything else. The effective range of a Beretta 92FS is around 50 meters which translates to around 54.7 yards and he was engaging a hostile at 60 to 70 yards. That's well outside the effective range of the weapon he was using.
If anything, this tells me that the guards we have now in schools already ought to be better armed, much like how patrol cops were given M4 carbines after the North Hollywood shootout. If Gardner had had a security vehicle with, say, an H&K MP5 submachinegun in the trunk, he could have engaged more effectively because that weapon has an effective range of 200 meters (218.7 yards). Or, the more budget friendly H&K UMP9, which has an effective range of 100 meters (109.4 yards).
How about this? We all stop and chill out for a moment. We've been debating this whole thing for three months, and some of the stuff here's starting to remind me of what we fucking submit in the quote queue. So let's get the peace pipe out and calm down. Feels like 12 Angry Men in this frickin' thread...
THIS THIS THIS
We can arm guards, and teachers all you want, but as long as we have culture that says the way to solve a problem is through the use of a gun, these shootings will continue, and our communities will continue to break down.
I'm all for allowing ourselves a break for a while from the issue of gun control because after three months of saying the same things right now it's feeling less like a debate and more like a polite way to call each other idiots.
But what I do want to end this post on is a simple fact as I see it: if you focus on removing the tools used in the commission of a crime (such as firearms) but don't remove the desire to commit (or the perceived necessity to commit) a crime, then you will have done nothing to ensure people are any safer than they were before.
