Fighting fire with fire

[cassiesmom]

Here is my two cents. And I have both a personal and family history of mental conditions, so I'm not exactly living in a glass house on this one.

People who have been treated for mental illnesses (such as the NIU shooter, who underwent treatment for self-injury and was discharged from the military because of mental health problems) SHOULD NOT be able to obtain guns.

But, also, the stigma attached to treatment of mental illness needs to go away. That will take a societal, attitude change. A paradigm shift.

[RICHARD]

People kill people but guns sure make it easier to kill a whold big bunch of unsuspecting people.

Not true. Unless you have a belt fed machine gun you have to stop and reload.

[Jessika]

There was another shooting recently (there have been so many it is hard to keep track...) in Kirkwood Missouri. An guy, unhappy about his parking tickets shot up city hall during a meeting. First guy he shot and killed was the armed policeman at the door. He then took his gun and shot the armed policeman inside the building and then the mayor and some others.

Fat lot of good being armed did. Unless you are ready every second of every minute of every day...how do you expect to know? I really doubt most nuts jobs give advance warning so you have time to get your gun out, loaded, cocked and ready to go.

Yeah we live not even five minutes from Kirkwood. That was really sad. At least they got the guy though.

[Edwina's Secretary]

Not true. Unless you have a belt fed machine gun you have to stop and reload.

I read the gunman in Illiniois had a gun that held 60 rounds. That strikes me as a whole lot of people (or even a whold lot of people!)

[lizbud]

This subject certainly has sparked a lot of comment from all over the
country. I read one such comment this morning that has merit I think.


Commentary

Vulnerable schools need protection
Guns, training for teachers may be answer

By David McGrath
February 19, 2008

Thirty-nine students attend my American literature seminar this semester. Our classroom is the first one you see on the left, as you enter the unlocked humanities building.

If a psychotic gunman were searching for a tight cluster of multiple bodies -- an easy target for seeking revenge, casting out demons, achieving immortality or whatever else his perverse purpose happens to be -- he would find my classroom door wide open. He could assume a position straddling the threshold and blocking the exit, so that he could fire at the trapped students at will, reload his weapon and fire once again. We would be sitting ducks in yet another American schoolhouse tragedy.

But if I were packing a loaded automatic pistol in a shoulder holster beneath my jacket, we might have half a chance.


I am no Rambo. I am a middle-age English professor with no military background. But as an outdoorsman, I have a passing acquaintance with the use of firearms, experience which could be refined to a skill of safety and competence, with adequate training.

Years in classroom management in urban high schools, colleges and universities makes me attuned and alert to every individual, and their comings and goings in my classroom.

And because of the responsibility I feel toward my students, I would do whatever I could to protect their lives, even without a weapon. So why not arm me and give them a reasonable chance?

Two years ago, I wrote an essay expressing skepticism about arming school personnel. But that was before the mass murders at Virginia Tech, Louisiana Technical College and Northern Illinois University, among others.

My perspective has changed because the country is changing cataclysmically. The rash of cold-blooded serial killings on campuses is now less an anomaly than a wave of terror. It demands new initiatives to safeguard the lives of people seeking a college education.

I remain adamantly opposed to permitting students to carry concealed weapons. The prospect of thousands of teenage and 20-something students carrying guns on college campuses is only asking for trouble.

But training and equipping seasoned adults, who also happen to be select and exhaustively screened college professors, is a hopeful solution.

I am not suggesting arming all teachers. I have had many brilliant colleagues, who are my betters when it comes to teaching, who, nonetheless, do not inspire trust when they use the office paper cutter, let alone a 9 mm Glock.

My suggestion, rather, is for the institution of a voluntary program for willing, able and properly trained school personnel to carry weapons.

My hope is that they will never have to use them. My belief is that a future, inevitable school sniper will be stopped dead by a sociology or economics or literature professor, the news of which may lead to a subsequent, precipitous decline in school shootings.

Any such proposal will meet a lot of resistance. After all, we worry about guns, no matter who has them. I know individual school security guards whom I'd rather see with a baton or a can of pepper spray than a Smith & Wesson.

But besides being a teacher, I am also a parent with three children who have attended colleges away from home.

And I believe that, as a father, if I'm apprised that coach Jones in the gym building, and professor Maddox in the arts center, and Dr. Heinz in the science lab, have all volunteered for weapons training, because they wanted to protect the lives of my children, I would sleep a lot better at night.

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David McGrath, an emeritus professor at the College of DuPage, is teaching English at the University of South Alabama.

[Pembroke_Corgi]

According to your own stats: Firearm-related crime has plummeted since 1993, then slightly increased in 2005.

Hrmm... if we keep violent video games and crime goes down, it also then appears that having guns causes a plummet in related crimes. So not banning video games based on your stats = not making guns illegal.

This makes absolutely no sense at all because obviously if guns didn't exist there would be zero gun-related crime. Fluctuating statistics doesn't make the case that guns are safe no matter how you look at it.

Probably crime dropped after 1993 due to the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act passed in 1994. Part of this act also included an assault weapons ban. The assault weapons ban expired in 2004, which actually could account for the increase in fire-arms related crime in 2005.

[RICHARD]

The jefe de la policia, for the LAPD is Wm. Bratton.

Formerly of the NYPD, he has made it a point to reduce all crime in Lost Angeles-the 'statistics' bear this out!


The crime stats for the different precincts get skewed like this.

East valley

2004 - 4 deaths
2005 - 2 deaths

HOLY Hollow point! A 50% drop in murders!

West valley

2004-10 deaths
2005- 8 deaths

A 20% drop-combine those two numbers and you get a phenomenal percentage drop in the murder rate.

Not a good indicator-

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ANd what constitutes a crime rate?

Those numbers area a mish mosh of violent crimes-can we look at the gun related numbers on their own?

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ES,

I didn't read any stories about the guns- I just heard that it was two pistols and a shotgun.


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MY last comment is about some of the schools here in El Lay/cah lee fuh nee ah and crime in general.

Some have metal detectors at the front gates. Everyone goes thru them....
The schools, like the one in Oxnard, where people believe that "nothing like this has ever happened here"have none and the reaction to a school shooting makes me scream and laugh.

Evil has a passport that allows access to any point on the planet.
If you have such a narrow field of view concerning guns, kids and massacres in a school, I am really sorry about the wake up call, but am totally stunned at your ignorance.


Our ignorance expands to a store clerk getting shot over a few bucks in a store. We can shake those off ad nauseum, every day...But when Eric and Dylan go 'ballistic' in Littleton, Colorado we reel in shock and climb over ourselves to figure out why!

Is it any more shocking to go thru the ashes of a massacre and find a reason than it is to not to find one?

Oh, the "trenchcoat mafia" left us videos, comp files and detailed plans. So we know why they did it.

To make "sense" of a senseless killing really makes sense.
Typical stupidity on all our parts. We just need an reason why and pulling a gun in a high school makes perfect sense.

[Catlady711]

I'm split on the issue, but I agree with the above quote 100%.

Guns are a tool used by people to kill yes, but it's not the gun or the law abiding citizens that own guns that cause the majority of problems. The problem is in why society, specifically in the U.S., has become so brain dead that this kind of tragedy has become the norm. There is no such thing as family TV anymore, many kids find educational or non-violent video games to be boring, and kids are enabled more and more to disobey laws, disrespect others, and get away with it.

There is a lot more wrong with these murderes than their ability to access weapons.

The key is that I know the difference between right and wrong, but sadly it seems that more and more people don't know that difference and good role models are undermined so much by the mass media attention on poor role models that any chance of common sense making a come back are very limited. We need to get back to basics as a society.

Two words come to my mind on the cause of alot of this misery....

"Situational Ethics"