Zero's ZERO tolerance applies
Posted on 12/31/2012 9:25:35 PM PST by Kaslin
The NRA’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, has been the subject of Beltway ire for his proposal to put police officers in schools across the country; the White House, lawmakers, and political analysts on both sides of the aisle have summarily denounced him. Rewind just 13 years, though, and many of these lawmakers were cheering a proposal that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one set forth by the NRA: President Clinton’s “COPS in Schools” program.
In October 1998, Clinton announced the $60 million grant program, which was housed in the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). “This initiative provides communities with a new tool to tackle crime and violence in our schools,” he said. According to the Justice Department, the program was intended to help police officers “engage in community policing in and around primary and secondary schools,” and the government spent over $753 million to hire more than 6,500 school police officers before the COPS in Schools program was cut in 2005.
In the wake of the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, Clinton intensified his efforts in behalf of the program and used the first anniversary of the Columbine shooting to announce additional funding. In his weekly radio address on April 16, 2000, Clinton said, “In our national struggle against youth violence, we must not fail our children.” He continued, “Already, [COPS in Schools] has placed 2,200 officers in more than 1,000 communities across our nation, where they are heightening school safety as well as coaching sports and acting as mentors and mediators for kids in need.”
Several of those who are now critical of the NRA’s plan expressed their support for Clinton’s program and benefited from it. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district was one of the first to receive funding through the program: $3.25 million for 26 new police officers, to be exact. As a whole, California, also home of Dianne Feinstein, received $5.6 million in grants from the COPS in Schools program in 1999 alone.
Touting the grants set to be distributed to several New York state school districts in 2004, Senator Chuck Schumer acknowledged that “we live in a different world now than we did 20, 30, or even three years ago” and said that the new realities are forcing parents to think constantly about the safety of their children. “Getting more police officers on school grounds will go a long way toward making sure our kids stay out of harm’s way,” he said. Schumer assailed the Bush administration’s 2005 budget for doing away with the COPS in Schools program and, in doing so, attested to its efficacy. “Thanks to COPS, people feel safer with their children on the streets today,” he said in a press release in May 2004. “But now the Administration has proposed ending the program and taking away funding to hire thousands of police officers just when they are needed most. Why the Administration would want to rip a hole in that sense of security by slashing COPS funding is beyond me.”
Even one of the leading gun-control advocates in Congress, New York congresswoman and anti-gun activist Carolyn McCarthy, had kind words for the COPS in Schools program. McCarthy’s husband was murdered and her son severely injured in a mass shooting. “Our school safety officers that go in, that is probably one of the best programs I have seen in my underserved schools,” she told the House Committee on Homeland Security in 2007. “Relationships are made. The kids feel safer with them around, and we need to do a better job on that, too.”
On the heels of the NRA’s press conference last week, however, the tune from Democrats on Capitol Hill changed. “Now, trying to prevent shootings in schools without talking about guns is like trying to prevent lung cancer without talking about cigarettes,” Schumer told David Gregory on Meet the Press. If Schumer supports both more restrictive gun-control laws and putting police in schools, he failed to make that clear, and his office did not return a call seeking comment.
Pelosi’s hypocrisy was more blatant. “For the NRA and others to sort of shield themselves by saying it’s the mentally ill or something and therefore we have to have more armed cops in the schools or more guns in the school, it just doesn’t make sense,” she said of the organization’s proposal. Her office did not reply to an e-mail seeking comment. McCarthy, whose office also failed to reply to an e-mail seeking comment, charged that the NRA is “out of touch” with the American people.
As for Feinstein, she’s looking to team up with President Clinton in order to draft the gun-control legislation she plans to introduce on the Senate floor. “President Clinton called, and if there’s anything he can do to help, he will do it,” she said in a press conference. Perhaps the former president will refresh her memory about the solution that he and other Democrats embraced to combat gun violence when the political winds were blowing in a different direction.
I’m against it.
We should arm principles and existing school officials. We don’t need new government employees.
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Yeah, BRING THE TSA/CPA UNIONS into our school... another way of turning common sense into a rape the kiddies boondoggle, keeping pesky parents out... I can see that happening...
It’s why they were for it and now against it etc...
Let the Carnival continue and make the kiddies participate in it, Sesame street style with the gays and convicts having more say than “parents with emotional clinging chivalrous narcissistic conflicts of interests”... (sarc off)
I can see the BS happening indeed...
Zero's ZERO tolerance applies
Zero's ZERO tolerance applies. We cannot spoil their drunkenness priviledges, him and bohener stupid, or whatever the frack their names are.
lets examine this a bit more closely.
For as long as I been on Free Republic I have heard the mantra that "ALL" public school employees are money grubbing, gun hating liberal, union thugs, too stupid to hold real jobs, that engage in serial child abuse. (Let me know if I left any thing off)
There have been threads recently comparing public schools to prisons and now it is suddenly okay to arm these miscreant dregs of society to save the lives of children!
In early March of 1999, right after Columbine several other teachers and myself were approached about being armed at our school during the day. Each of us had CCW permits, either military and /or security training. We met with the building principal, Asst. Superintendent and Superintendent.
The very first question we asked was "What about liability, and how will we be covered?"
Now keep this in mind: I AM NOT OPPOSED TO THIS IDEA, I JUST THINK SOME QUESTIONS NEED TO BE ANSWERED FIRST.
1) Liability insurance: Will this be provided by the district, union (if there is one), employee?
2) Training: Who will provide it? Who will pay for it (See #1)? Who will be required to attend? What constitutes successful completion of training? How often will they be required to re certify and who will pay for the re certification (see#1)? What about the building official that just can't bear the idea of carrying a weapon, much less in school? Should that person be fired, demoted, replaced, transferred, lose their credentials?
3) Weapons: What will they carry? Who decides what they will carry? Will they carry concealed or open? Will the have the option of long arms? What capacity magazine? Who pays for the weapon and ammunition (see #1)? Where will the weapons be stored? How will they be stored? Who will have access to them?
These are jsut a few question right off the top of my head.
Remember: I AM NOT OPPOSED TO THIS IDEA, I JUST THINK SOME QUESTIONS NEED TO BE ANSWERED FIRST.
Metmom you might want to put this on your ARTH ping list.
Regarding insurance the issue of indemnification is just as important.
Insurance has limits, exclusions and all sorts of subrogation issues. Whose insurance is primary and will you have to sue your district to be defended by their carrier?
Stopping a killer is primary but governmental bodies don’t like to share their protections.
Don’t worry comrade. This is all for the best.
The kids need to learn to have the government enforced police presence in their lives watching over them, all for their own good, of course.
What better way to prepare minds to accept a police state than to start in schools with impressionable young minds and fearful parents.
It’s all for the children, you see........
In another generation, nobody will know what freedom is.
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At first glance, the “COPS in Schools” doesn’t seem as if it is designed for armed security police as much as it is a community outreach program. “Police are human, too!!”
Yes, there would be police in and around the schools at times, but the seems to be acting more in a PR position rather than full-time ‘at the doors’ security personnel.
Let me know if I have this wrong.
I was only referring to the issue of guns.
Principals and teachers, etc, have the right to defend themselves and be armed. That is my only point.
The idea of putting POLICE there instead of allowing individuals their constitutional rights is the wrong message for those kids.
Overall, I’d like to abolish government schools, of course.
Not a fan of the NRA nor of militarized government institutions.
The issue for me is mental health and treatment of persons with mental health problems. If it is not safe to allow them access to firearms then they also should not have access to knives or cars, and should be under confinement until that changes.
That being said, I have a lot of questions about what happened at Newtown. I saw a CNN clip the other day in which one of the “parents” was smiling and laughing until he approached the podium to make a statement, and then suddenly his demeanor changed to sorrow, sadness etc. It was one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. Has anyone else seen this clip, and if so, what did you make of it?
Your opionion is myopic, if you just think you can blithly say "Arm the Principals...."
I am saying allow armed individuals who have the righ to be there to be armed, as per the second amendment before we decide to keep the indivuals disarmed and add cops.
If we fixed all the other crap first, I doubt we would even be having such a conversation
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Politely and respectfully,
wintertime
What better way to prepare minds to accept a police state than to start in schools with impressionable young minds and fearful parents.
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The schools already resemble prisons both inside and out. And,...Indeed!....What better way to prepare the people for tyranny than to treat them as prisoners when they are children.
One problem will be that once the schools are secure, the bad guys will go for softer targets. Why? because people are depraved and evil and want to kill and hurt.
I don’t know if anyone remembers it, but Pres Clinton wanted to put cops with guns in all the schools back in the early 90’s That might have been a pretty good idea. But no one liked it then.. Now we are all about it?
Yeah, we live in the moment here in the good ol’ USA
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