tvc184

Oh yeah, Sandy Hook. No officers but campus secured by locked doors which worked as planned. Adam Landsa shot out the door and stepped through…

Columbine. School Officer on scene and they planned to take him out at the outset. He foiled their plan by not eating him typical cafeteria lunch but maybe oddly (premonition?) brown bagged that day and decided to eat in his car. In fact he engaged them almost immediately but as a school officer was on scene, they knew that and prepared to take him out. Parkland, FL Stoneman Douglas high school, school officer on scene…. 17 dead, 17 wounded. The largest school shooting, VT. An entire police department on campus and moments away… 31 dead victims at the school and 17 more shot.

And what does that mean? They yelled at him 50 yards away? They put him on a wall and were frisking him? Please let the rest of us know these details that you have. I am truly curious.

I am not against any of that. I have said probably a couple of times in this thread, harden the schools, arm the teachers and if you want to, add police officers. At least make it hard and when somebody does start the attempt at mass murder, at least cut down the casualties. The point I hit is mainly at politicians and the news media that repeo the mantra that we have to stop this from ever happening again and the fact is you cannot. You can minimize the impact. Your numbers are a little flawed however. Counting equipment, training and the stuff you’ve mentioned, every officer probably costs $125,000 a year. You say a trooper per school. Oooookay….. It would be more like 3-4 per school so about $3-$4 Billion extra per year. A single officer, working a single door and taking absolutely no break, even to go to the bathroom it’s what your numbers would entail. Realistically it would take at least 3 to 4 officers to secure a school somewhat effectively. Even that is just getting by. That does not account for sick days, vacation, mandatory training, etc.

Out of curiosity, do you have any experience shooting man size targets with a handgun under a severe time constraint, while under extreme stress and then at other targets that are moving?

School shootings are probably not mass murders. I think if a guy accidentally shoots a gun in the parking lot, they call that a school shooting. In other cases might be one guy got mad at another guy and shot him in the leg. I tend to think that such person-to-person shootings happen more in larger inner-city areas than in rural areas. ND is pretty rural. The entire state has roughly twice the population of Harding, Jefferson and Orange counties. That is sometimes the problem with statistics. Many times the people that are anti-gun report how many gun deaths happen every year in the United States. What they call a gun deaths are not all homicides because it turns out that at least half of them are suicides. In some discussions however, the numbers are put out to imply that they are murders when in fact they are not. I have not checked in the last year but in most years approximately 2 to 3 times as many people are murdered with hands and feet than there are with rifles. Here is the FBI report on the known murders (criminal homicide) in the United States over a five-year period ending in 2019. Look at 2019 rifle murders, 364. Now look at personal (hands, feet, etc.), strangulation (which is also Personal however you are not beaten or kicked to death) and blunt objects such as striking someone with a hammer, ain personal but the hand held weapon killed instead of the hand itself. So The numbers for being hit with a hammer, beaten, kicked or strangled comes to more than 1,200. Toss in knives and the total goes to almost 3,000. Let’s see, 364 killed by those evil rifles and 1,200 with hands or blunt instruments held by the hand and 1,600 on sharp instruments held by the hand. So hands, feet or handheld items are 800% more likely to kill you than a rifle. Is it the weapon that is the problem or the person? So in 2019 we had 13,927 people murdered. If we could have saved the life of 100% of the people killed by a rifle, murder total and that year would drop to….. 13,563. Wow, getting rid of rifle would have a huge impact!!! In reality, most of those killed with a rifle could have been killed with a pistol but the actor simply had a rifle available. Therein lies the politics of gun control. If we could just get rid of those rifles and those high-capacity magazines……

And those theoretical sprayed bullets would have gone where?

That is what I was talking about. If they were in position to do so. Do you have any information that they were in position failed to stop him? I was chasing a felony suspect one time and he went over the fence of a fenced in school and broke into the school while I was chasing him. There were no kids there and he turned out not to be armed but we did not know that at the time. The guy was ahead of me however and running away. So, were these officers in position to stop the guy? Do we have any information that their training failed at them? If you want to see criticism, go behind the scenes in a shift meeting, a locker room, a secure police forum or on the back lot of the police station and watch officers criticize other officers. We aren’t exactly shy about calling them like we see them. We don’t always do it in public but we typically don’t defend what we think is stupidity.

Oops…. it went over my head.

Yep, that is why I prefaced it with overpriced with a pretty cool store. They used to have a decent restaurant inside. It has been about 10 years since I’ve been there. Buc-ee’s…. corn, restrooms, ice…. keep heading south.

I think it was during the Obama administration that many conservative organizations tried to get 501(c)(3) non-profit tax exemptions and were repeatedly denied but when looking into it, similar liberal groups were easily certified.

That would be a nearly impossible task since you would have to find their social media and have them admit that it was theirs. I know as background checks we have checked social media pages but you never know if someone has something hidden under a false identity. To expect at the point of a gun sale to start checking someone’s thousands of posts on maybe a dozen different social media sites, would be an almost impossible task. If assuming that became a standard, people would simply start with a falsified name in that post under their true identity. Maybe while on the way to perpetrate an act they might change to their real identity or something like that but unfortunately, these people aren’t stupid.

It would not take long. I was directly involved in such an investigation which fortunately turned out to be negative. We got information of an online threat and jumped all over it and had what we needed within an hour or so should we have needed to act. That is not the end or nearly all of the investigation but it gives enough to start confronting someone and doing some fairly quick intervention.

[Hidden Content] Mass murder, not suicide except the guy that did it.

I have no clue as to the sequence of events but what training are you suggesting that they forgot?

I would think that legal immigrants are vetted before entry is allowed but don’t know. The majority is probably not people who applied, filled out their application and waited in line.

They are far from minimum wage, just sayin’….. At one time government workers were thought to get less pay but better benefits so it was a trade off. Now it might be pay and benefits.

My favorite overpriced sporting goods store is/was (?) in Uvalde… Oasis Outback.

No, it’s the two amendments that most seem threatened. How much of an issue is the right to privacy in your home and entry has to be with your consent or a warrant signed by a magistrate, the right to an attorney or the right not to give a statement? To try to claim otherwise is a straw man argument.

I had mentioned this previously. What is the deadliest school attack in United States history? It was almost 100 years ago, in 1927. How many firearms were used? None. A 55 year old man lost a school board election and was angry at the world. He used dynamite and killed 38 children at school. He sat back and waited until rescuers rushed in to help, then he drove a pick up truck loaded with dynamite into the people and detonated that, killing and injuring more. Counting the perpetrator who committed suicide in the explosion, there are 48 dead and 53 injured. It is 101 casualties at a school where no firearms were used. That was in Bath, Michigan. How do you stop an attacker who can choose his target and has time to plan? About three years ago I asked some high school students about the same thing because of another similar incident at the time. What happens at the local high school if they put a policeman at every door or where entry is allowed with a metal detector? Would that stop an incident? Can we lock the school down and make sure no one gets in with a weapon? Sure!!! Okay, would that stop a shooting at the school? Certainly!! So I asked them, in this lockdown and safe school what happens when the final bell rings? The answer was that within about two or three minutes, 1900 students pour out of the school. Of those, about 500 gather at the bus stop. So for my next scenario, I have a semi-automatic rifle with plenty of ammo and a suppressor. If I am 100 yards away concealed, how many children can I shoot before they even realize what is happening? Dozens? Which way would they run not knowing where the shots are coming from? This has already happened in 1998 in what was the second deadliest school shooting in US history before Columbine a year later. In Arkansas and 11--year-olds and a 13-year-old child took some weapons and waited for a fire drill at school. They were small and not nearly prepared but they shot 15 people and I believe five of them died. Because they were too young to be sentenced as adults, they stayed in prison until they were 21 and released. I believe one is alive today and one was killed in a car crash about 15 years ago. Of course they did not have suppressed weapons and we’re not shooting into a crowd of kids at a bus stop. I could go further, a lot further but do you get the point? And to be sure I am not against safety measures. You might as well make it at least tough and have someone put some thought process into it rather than on a whim, walking into a school and start shooting. You cannot stop a dedicated attacker however. How much money and circumstances are you willing to spend to save that single life? We could pass a federal law requiring governors on all vehicles to restrict speed to 45 miles an hour and we would reduce highway deaths by about 30,000 people a year. How much money should we spend annually to save 30,000 people?

The “one life saved” is a bogus premise.

No different.

I went back and edited it a couple of minutes after I posted the comment. It was supposed to say I completely agree with arming the teachers. The predicted text feature added “can’t”.

I completely agree with armed teachers if they are willing. But….. Twenty armed police on campus can’t stop a person that has time to plan. It was not an elementary school but the deadliest school shooting in US history (not the most in a mass murder which was not with firearms) was Virginia Tech. They had their own police department which responded within moments. The attacker, since he had time to plan, eliminated the threat of the police for long enough to do his killing. The fix was about $5 worth of chain and a padlock. And what weapons? AR15? AK47? No, a .22 pistol and a 9mm with the.22 being little more than a tiny bullet generally used to target practice. Harden the schools, arm the teachers but realize you cannot stop a dedicated attacker who can choose the time, location, means, etc. Unless you take away all guns, you cannot stop shootings, period. Even if you could, you couldn’t stop a mass murder, only the means.

I doubt any at the point of attack but it depends on definitions or expectations.