Connecticut Massacre

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I don't know where you got the idea that security guards would be mentally stable Tal. That sure as hell isn't my image of the people who chose that profession. They too often get enough of a power trip just wearing a uniform and wielding a flash light, add a gun and even more nutters would seek out the profession to live out their fantasies.

 

Where jobs are in abundance, Security Guard jobs are at the bottom. Of course you can have mentally unstable people in that position. That job is NOT known to pay very well, hence you can get bottom feeders in that field. Go to a local Mall here in the states and take a look at a security guard. Odds are your first impression from a casual glance is that they can't protect anyone. It is usually a retiree...a.k.a. Old Guy... or someone who is challenged... or a really skinny, nerdy guy in his late teens or early twenties who couldn't punch his way out of a paper bag.

I am NOT making fun of them, but it is the plain truth of the matter. Hi-tech/Hi-trained SecurityGuards I would be all for, but you have to realize the costs. It won't happen here, whether we want it or not. Even those guys can be unstable, as the would likely come from military/police backgrounds. There is a little thing here called PTSD....

This was a very nice town, small with a very low crime rate. It was just a bad combo of a lot of things. Though I would venture if the gun availability to this kid was lessoned, it would of increased the chance of him not choosing this path.

My kids are staying in Private school.

 

Gacy and Daumer both worked as security guards ... I would not trust a security guard any more than any other person on the street. That said, once the security guard has extended background checks required (usually) to work in a school I would trust them more.

To closer answer the question -- only schools in high crime areas typically have extensive security. Most high schools also have security of some kind. It's rare to have a security guard at an elementary school.

 

I can't believe that everyone isn't completely horrified by the idea of armed security guards in schools! Do some of you actually think that's a normal and acceptable thing?

Unbelievable.

Even Barmy Army can see how scary that idea is.

If you guys think that's a reasonable scenario where you live then this just reinforces what I already knew: that I live in paradise and you couldn't pay me to go and live in a country with armed security guards in schools.

 

Armed guards in schools will NEVER pass here. Not a possibility in our public school system, as I said, with the population here, the costs would be enormous.

And yes, before you can even remotely comment on the situation of the States, come visit for a month or two, visit all the PUBLIC places that currently have security guards. You will see a hodge podge of some very odd looking people.

When I was a kid, there was a very large Mental Institution in Philadelphia by the name of Byberry Mental Hospital. It had over 5,000 patients. My father did work there from time to time, as we owned a Brunswick Billiards dealership and sold them pretty much all of there game room needs. We had several pool tables in the facilities what we did service work on. They had one in every building which was used for housing. When it closed a few decades ago, what do you think happened to all the patients? A large portion were released into the public. What were the number one and two job placements for them? You guessed it....Security/Maintenance. There was a lot of problems with those who were released.

In order to hire trained security, you need a surplus of trained security ready to enter the work force. They don't just appear out of thin air...... And neither do the funds to support it.

 

I've had a very hard time coming to grips with this. Killing 20 children - babies essentially, as 6-year olds aren't much more than that. The scary part for me is that this was a little quiet in New England. This isn't the ghetto of NYC. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Those kids did nothing wrong. Their parents kissed them on the cheek, put them on the school bus and never saw them again.

This is the third time in six months that we've had a psycho walk into a public building and shoot up the place. A movie theater, a mall, and now an elementary school for god's sake. What next? A parade? A hospital? You can't protect all the places all the time. I'm not calling for a ban on firearms, but right now we are doing a terrible job of keeping guns out of the hands of the crazies of the world. (Also of note - a ban would do little good, due to the number of guns present in the US. There are more guns than people in this country. A ban would not simply make them go away.)

But we have to do something. I disagreed with Bob Costas a couple of weeks ago when he stated that when one of the players in the NFL killed his girlfriend and then committed suicide that they would still be alive if he didn't have a gun. Well, I certainly don't think we'd by burying 20 first graders this week if this psycho didn't have a gun. (An as an aside - what the hell was his mother thinking? She's among the dead, so we can't ask her, but you're taking an emotionally unstable person with Asperger's Syndrome and teaching him how to fire an assault weapon? What the hell?)

The price of freedom is not the lives of our children. It can't be. I have a very libertarian attitude towards gun ownership, but even I have a limit. And when you get to the life of my kid going to school, you've certainly reached it. And I agree with Obama that there is no law that can be written that will prevent something like this from ever happening again. With hundreds of millions of legally purchased firearms in the US, the gun culture is so prevalent that anything resembling a ban would be unenforcable.

So what then? I have a few suggestions. First order of business - I don't want security guards - I want police officers. Two per school. Yeah, the cost of an officer is a couple hundred dollars per officer per day. If that means that me, and every other property owner in the county has to fork over an extra $100 a year in property taxes, so be it. Just from a deterrance point of view, you may be less likely to pick a school, if you know when you shoot your way in, there's a couple of police officers with guns drawn pointing back at you. Children, especially young ones, tend to have a very high opinion of police officers. They're "the good guys".

But there are certainly other measures that can be taken. How about instead of glass doors we have steel doors for the entrance into schools? Ones where you can't just shoot your way in. Throw in a couple of closed circuit video cameras outside, along with an intercom system that would only allow someone entry if they were buzzed in. (Of course the teachers would be able to have swipe cards for entry.)

And then on the gun side of things. I have no problem with someone owning a gun or a few dozen handguns for personal protection. I think assault rifles are beyond the realm of personal protection. The assault rifle he was firing had a 30-round magazine, and was undoubtedly an enabling tool for this unspeakable crime.

How about a more stringent policy on acquiring any gun? Not just a little questionairre that you have to fill out to get one. And yes, that's an inconvenience for the gun owner, but I think the onus should be on the person buying the gun to prove he's a responsible person of sound mind before getting one. Because here's a little secret. We estimate that only about 20% of the people with some type of mental deficiency are "on the books". That means 80% of them with sail through the background checks currently in place for acquiring a firearm at the present time. And then you get what we have seen here - repeatedly.

 

It should be a gradual thing, but I definitely think the US can change attitudes on gun ownership.

Start by banning ads like this. You can't even advertise cigarettes in this country, let alone a gun.

Then just flat ban gun ownership, unless the person has a valid reason. After that hold gun amnesties nationwide every couple months for the next few years. I'm sure a portion of the public would retain their weapons illegally, but through educating the next generation and slowly altering the public opinion, that number would reduce.

It would be a hard fight, as this topic is so ingrained in American culture, but it's a fight you can't just give up on, with the sheer amount of these atrocities. I think the country would get there eventually. SOMETHING just has to be done. It can't be allowed to go on like this; the numbers are horrific. Any civilised country shouldn't allow so much gun crime to pass.

 

Your response implies a greatly simplified concept of how choice works. There is no indication this 20-year-old kid could have "just as easily chosen not to commit a senseless act of murder."

Of course there simply isn't much data available about this (which of course does not stop the "talking heads" from making vague pronouncements about what the U.S. needs to do, most of which would have nothing to do with heading off tragedies like this in the future), but my understanding was that the young man who committed these crimes was mentally ill. It's extremely difficult to correctly comprehend the variety of aggregate factors that lead to the specific actions of any sane, "normal" person--and even more so for a person lacking in normal decision-making apparatus or with a flawed perception of the world and his role in it.

This was quite a deliberate act which took a fairly significant amount of planning and perhaps even "training" (he seems to have been a fairly competant marksman, though I, of course, have no idea how he planned and executed this whole thing, with little information so far released)--and it therefore probably went on some time. Behavioral studies indicate the more someone prepares, in terms of time, effort, energy, and resources, to execute a particular course of action, the more difficult it is to dissuade that person from following that course of action.

My comment is simply that he quite likely felt compelled to perform this action for a variety of reasons we'll never understand and spent some time preparing to do it. It wasn't a simple "on-off" choice. I didn't mean to be combative nor vague.

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I hate that ad. Let's give it the benefit of the doubt and say it's 22 years old ("West Germany," anyone?) and probably no longer relevant.

There are a vast number of issues related to violence in the United States. It is extraordinately simplistic, bordering on both nonsensical and irresponsible, to compare a specific form of violence in one state to a specific form of violence in a completely different state.

 

It's a bit old, but the figures are still quite similar. Handgun shootings in the UK last year were 50, and the US was around 10k.

 

Didn't a guy in China knife some kids recently?

Getting the guns away from the crazies is a great idea. Easier said than done, but a great idea. But keeping the crazies out of society is what will stop this from happening. They do the killing, not the guns or knives.

But how do you keep them from society? You probably can't. Removing guns from the scenario will help and I am all for it. But it is not the end all solution.

 

It sadly isn't an end all solution. And I realize any further restrictions will be met with outcry from the NRA and other gun ownership advocates, which is why I'm suggesting stricter laws on acquiring a gun in the first place, rather than an unenforcable ban on ownership. Yes, that's an inconvenience for the 99.9% of gun owning, law abiding citizens, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for personal freedom. The onus has to be on the person wishing to acquire the firearm in the first place.

And as an aside, while I understand the argument that we shouldn't punish the 999,999 people who don't use guns to kill innocents for the 1 who does, I will simply counter that it's a great statistic unless you happen to be one of the parents of the kids in Newtown....

 

The statistic is probably closer to 100:1 -- if it was one in a million we wouldn't be having this conversation.

 

I completely agree with your above remarks Aldeth.

I have no immediate "need" to own a gun. But, there is a chance that I might. If someone starting threatening me or my family, I would feel much better with a new security system and a firearm by my side. I don't want to put my fate or my families in the hands of a quick response time to a 911 call. There isn't a station anywhere near my house and Rockford has a very high murder rate. I don't live in town, but I am only a few miles away from the West side, which is pretty bad. I would prefer to have a plan B, just in case.

 

Of course it's not an end all solution, but it's as close you're going to get. The killers ability to do harm was greatly increased by his access to semi-automatics, weapons that only exist to kill as many human beings as possible in a short space of time. I think it's attitudes that need to change, as well as laws. It's not something that's going to be cured quickly.

 

This is how I see it.

A favorite trope of the pro-gun movement is the old canard we've all heard a million times: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Which is absolutely correct. They also like to point out that these were "isolated incidents," and the actions of a handful of deranged people don't negate the majority of law-abiding gun owners.

Likewise, airplanes don't kill people, a-holes who hijack planes and fly them into skyscrapers kill people. And yet, I remember that as a nation we worked immediately, systematically and decisively to put policies and procedures in place to keep deranged people from hijacking planes and using them as tools for mass murder. We made it much more difficult and inconvenient for the overwhelming majority of peaceful, law-abiding citizens to board airplanes. In the name of safety. It works.

The fact is, we live in a country where it is far easier for a civilian to obtain a firearm and a concealed carry permit than it is for a police officer. That's insane. We live in a country where a frightening number of people - like the mother of the shooter, who was his first victim - have been convinced by the NRA, talk radio, and other peddlers of delusional fantasies of the collapse of the economy and/or armed insurrection against the government that stockpiling an arsenal of munitions and assault rifles are necessary to secure one's safety and freedom. That's CLEARLY insane.

I grew up in a home with guns. I have no problem with them. For my entire life, at any given time my father has owned anywhere from 5-15 firearms. Currently: a glock 9mm, 2 deer hunting rifles, 4 target shooting rifles (he is a competitive trap shooter), and several antique rifles he keeps as heirlooms. He keeps them in a locked safe in the home.

When people bring up "gun control," they aren't talking about people like my dad. Because my dad would never dream of owning one of these:



Why? Because my dad is not batsh!t crazy, that's why. Or possessed of childish fantasies about "kickin' ass!" and had the good sense to watch Red Dawn only once and dismiss it as utterly fictional.

That's a Bushmaster .223. The gun the shooter used to mow down 20 children and 6 adults.

You can't possibly argue that a weapon like this is necessary - even practical! - for either home defense or hunting. You just can't, because that's not what it was made for. This was made for warfare. By any sensible person's definition, this is an assault weapon. But in America, and especially here in Texas, it's a toy for rednecks. Thanks to the lobbying of the NRA, however, the criteria for declaring a firearm an assault weapon has become so watered down and esoteric that you can pick this baby up at your local Acadamy Sports for about $700. That's insane.

I'm not saying we should ban all guns, and no one else is either. But Jesus - this madness has to end somewhere, and if not now, when? Gun nuts keep saying "this tragedy just happened. Now is not the time to talk about gun control." And they're right. The time to talk about it was the last mass shooting. And the one before that. And the one before that. It is not the death of freedom to demand that guns be FAR more difficult to acquire, and that those who own more than, say, 3 guns - one for home defense, 2 for sporting purposes - be made to jump through a hell of a lot of hoops and documentation to ensure they own these weapons for good reason, and are responsible enough to keep these weapons out of the hands of the unstable. That's hardly a knee-jerk over-raction, that's just basic safety and common sense.

I'm sure that if you described Mrs. Lanza to your average 2nd Amendment activist a week ago, he'd have described her as "the safest woman in America." I wonder if that's the last thing that went through her mind. Well, the second to last thing.

 

That's half the problem. A lot of the people at the top in America are batsh!t crazy.

Republican congressman Louie Gohmert says Sandy Hook principal should have had a machine gun so she could 'take his head off before he killed those precious kids'

Beyond reasoning.

 

I'm going to stay out of the heart of this issue, but I will chime in to support Tal's take on security guards. It's no more appropriate to stereotype them than it is to stereotype nuclear physicists. I work near quite a few of them, and like with any other 'group' (even saying they really share anything in common simply because they have security guard jobs is a bit foolish), there are good ones and bad ones. Some are actually amazingly devoted and reliable persons who provide a good, solid service for oftentimes little pay, simply because that's the kind of people they are. I'd take the odds on them having a shot (no pun intended) at stopping this kind of nonsense any day over sticking my head in the sand and simply laying down and allowing it to happen based on the fear that they might not do it as competently as a Navy Seal.

Bear in mind also that in the States at least, security guards have to undergo background checks and must have no criminal history - nor wants or warrants, meaning that they can't even have issues that they have not yet been found guilty of - in order to qualify for employment in the field. So the notion that criminals or clearly mentally unstable persons routinely populate their ranks is false.

 

I agree with that Barmy. But there is a big BUT there as well. Until the powers that be here in the US eliminate guns from the streets, many will not be willing to relinquish there legally owned guns. Most gun owners I know will agree with this. We all know Semi-automatics are made for one purpose. I believe they shouldn't be available to the public. That is the first step in gun control.

My attitude doesn't need to change. I agree with most of you. But I also see the reality that exists here in the US. There are a ton of gun advocates and it will take a huge battle to change gun laws.