Article itself is an excellent summary of the "Israeli Solution" to creeps who choose to shoot up schools in order to gain attention. The author interviews a one-time RAND corporation researcher. He references the Maalot massacre in 1974 as a turning point concerning the armed citizen in Isreal. Indeed, the Israelis came to realize the problem with school protection was gun control. One sentence is well worth quoting:
"When the message got around to the PLO groups and a couple infiltration attempts failed, the attacks against schools ceased."
Prayers for the families at Virginia Tech who lost loved ones, or have one right now in hospital.
Bull$hit.
Schools get attacked a lot; police stations don't.
Allow faculty to carry and offer incentives for those that do. Problem solved.
Exactly right.
If all or most of those kids have grown up around guns, knew how to use them and carried, the gunman would have gone down in the first two minutes, while most of the students surviving.
This is no reflection on the victims, because they were victims not only of the gunman, but also of our culture, that teaches them that they need to fear guns, instead of learning to use them, not to mention the laws, which prohibit them from carrying and using them, to defend themselves against crazed gunmen and terrorists.
Gunmen, terrorists all prey on the defenseless.
EXCELLENT ARTICLE.
THANKS.
I had a friend in college who’d spent a summer with a family in Israel. All the adults and older adolescents carried. When they came into the house, the mother of the family put her handgun down on the coffee table while they were sitting and talking.
A small child came into the room, toddled up to the coffee table, and started reaching for the gun. The mother picked up the gun, removed the magazine, checked that the chamber was clear, and put it back on the table. All without interrupting the conversation. Carrying was that casually integrated into daily life.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1819067/posts
bump for later reading
some basic,simple improvements not solutions
1.maybe really good locking mechanisms for individual classrooms doors or anything that would hold the door shut so it can’t be kicked in. When I was in school the teachers would always have the doors wide open. Pretty stupid IMO. It didn’t sound like the classrooms had very good locks or none because the students had to barricade the doors or hold them shut with their bodies.
2. some roll out fire ladders for second floor windows.
3. possibly some “in case of emergency” guns possibly painted in a bright orange color so when the cops storm the building they won’t be mistaken for a rampage killer. available to teachers and faculty of course.
I don’t think these improvements would be too costly.
I believe responsible adults should be able to have guns in their homes to protect themselves, and arguments have been put forth that this tradgedy could have been avoided/lessened had other students had guns, but how about this? College students = semi-rational, booze addled, sex crazed semi-adults. We really want to add firearms to that mix? Or how about this? Students hear what they believe to be gunfire. Two, or more, of them grab their guns and go out of their rooms to investigate. They meet in the hallway, and they think the other student was doing the shooting, and they start blasting away at each other.
Pinging Lady T,
There are some Questions on here that you may be able to help with from a womans point of view.
A good friend of mine, who is also my CCW and self defense instructor, wrote the following...I happen to agree:
In January of this year the Virginia State Legislature considered a bill that would allow concealed-carry permit (CCP) holders to carry their arms on school properties. The bill was killed as soon as it was introduced.
A spokesman for Virginia Tech. publicly thanked the legislature for defeating it so that people on their campus “would feel so much safer”. Now that 32 of their finest have been murdered by a maniac, on that campus that is now “so much safer”, I wonder if the lawmakers and that VT spokesperson are rethinking that bill. Probably not.
How is it that concealed-carry permit holders who are trained, background-checked and certified by the state cannot be trusted on school property? Is there something about being on school grounds that turns them into dangerous lunatics? I don’t think so.
Thirty two students and faculty were lined up and executed, one by one, because they were obeying the law that said: NO GUNS ON SCHOOL PROPERTY!
They paid a very high price for being law-abiding.
A science teacher was holding the door against the shooter while his students were escaping out the windows. He’s now a dead hero. I wonder what a handgun would have been worth to him? How many lives could he have saved?
When we announce to the world that there will be no firearms on school grounds, we are encouraging lunatics to shoot up our schools. And they are doing it. We disarm all the law-abiding but we can’t disarm the crazies who kill our kids because we set them up like sitting ducks.
How long are we going to put up with these losses? How many more kids have to die before we rethink stupid laws that put them at risk?