It is no longer theoretical. There is now a school whose teachers are armed. It should surprise nobody that it is located in Texas. The town of Harrold, specifically.

"We are 30 minutes from law enforcement," Harrold's school superintendent, David Thweatt, told the Guardian. "How long do you think it would take to kill all 150 of us? It would be a bloodbath."

Carefully selected teachers are to be trained in crisis management including handling hostage situations. Thweatt said: "When you have good guys with guns, the bad guys do less damage."


I guess now we get to find out if armed teachers are going to result in accidentally shot children, or if education will happen as normal.

*** The story is dated in 2008. Apparently there have been no incidents in the armed school in the three-and-a-half years since the article was first published. (If there had been an incident, you can be damn sure we'd have heard about it.)

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Sweet. Problem solved.

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Tanzania¹²

I approve, as long as they're very stringent on the teachers allowed to carry them; which it sounds like they are. I wonder how many of our resident liberals are going to scour Google trying to find an incident at this school after this happened to use as evidence of how stupid it is.

Better not turn in your homework late.

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RIP ROAD WOES 12/2/2012

No need to Google to realize how stupid it is.

"Carefully selected teachers are to be trained in crisis management including handling hostage situations. Thweatt said: "When you have good guys with guns, the bad guys do less damage."

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That's weak sauce!

Makes more sense when the teachers are screened for competence and the nearest law enforcement is 30 minutes away. I teach at such a school myself.

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Like I said in another thread. Identify those teachers with prior military experience, or current experience (National Guard or Reserve) and see if they would like this responsibility.

Since it's pretty apparent that most teachers would step in front of a gun to save a child, I can't imagine any of the above category would turn down the opportunity to stand behind one to save children either.

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Member formally known as AC59

Care to elaborate?

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You mean to tell me that people started bringing guns into a school four years ago and nobody has been killed from negligence? Someone must DO SOMETHING about this ticking time bomb!

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Feel free to contact me if you need legal assistance. I have a great lawyer that helped me with an ex who violated my privacy and kept harassing me on MySpace and Facebook. He's very good. And there is legal precedent. - linuxpro

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Anyone know how many school shootings there were in Harrold, before the janitor started carrying?

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If you're walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.................................................Mom

Why should that really matter? Parameters were reset when employees of this school were allowed to start carrying?

But if you really want to talking about before vs after... How many school shootings happened @ Columbine or Sandy Hook before them tragedies took place?
Or does that statistic not matter to you?

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Member formally known as AC59

Since every school shooting in the past two decades has grabbed headlines and stirred massive debate, and we haven't heard anything about a school shooting in Harrold, the obvious answer is zero.

But you can ask the same question about every school in the past two decades where there has been a shooting. How many shootings have happened prior to that shooting? Zero. (There was one repeat at VA Tech, but that's a college, and beyond the scope of this discussion.)

One of the things about school shootings that makes them so dangerous is that they are impossible to predict. If we knew where and when a school shooting was going to take place, we would pool resources there and stop it before it starts. Duh.

To protect a school, measures have to be in place before something bad happens. It's like car insurance. If you knew when an accident was going to happen, you could risk not having insurance until days before the accident. But you can't know, that's what makes them accidents. And getting insurance after an accident is just too damn late. The damage is already done. And at schools, the damage is measured in dead children.

Is that the price you are willing to pay to keep guns out of the hands of adult employees at schools?

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To get an accurate estimate of risk, one has to measure the accidental firing rate of qualified individuals carrying on the job, because that is what this is. Can't compare it to accidental firings in general, because there are situations far more common that throw the numbers off.

My guess is that it's one of the lowest numbers pertaining to this sort of thing out there. Not being touted much though, because it's damaging to the gun control side of things.

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I blog, I tweet. When I'm not writing or goofing around on Seahawks.NET.

Suckers!

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If you're walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.................................................Mom

Teachers have been legally allowed to carry in Oregon schools for years, provided they have a carry permit. Many do, especially in the rural communities, and you never hear about it. At the end of the day, everyone who has not otherwise had their rights stripped, should be allowed a Constitutionally protected means to self-defense.

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Feel free to contact me if you need legal assistance. I have a great lawyer that helped me with an ex who violated my privacy and kept harassing me on MySpace and Facebook. He's very good. And there is legal precedent. - linuxpro

He is hold back the legion of boom - skater18000

This problem is a lot more complex then arming our teachers, or more gun control, or censorship of media, or putting God back into the classroom will fix. It seems like Americans are fond of simple solutions for complex problems. If we looked deeper we'd realize we are the only industrialized nation to have this as a on going problem. Almost every country that doesn't have this problem don't arm their teachers, have more gun control then us, consume much of the same media we do, and far less pious. So what makes us so special? Perhaps in is the poor shape our mental health system is in, or something is just culturally wrong with us.

There are certain things we can do to close loopholes in current gun control laws, such as gun shows, and make it harder for people with mental health problems to get a weapon. That won't solve the problem, but without easy access to guns it will stop some of these crimes before they even happen. At the same time if I had the choice between an armed teacher having a gunfight at school with a potential mass murderer or allowing that murderer to go on that rampage because they are the only one armed I would choose the armed teacher shooting down the potential murderer every time. Though my overall preference would be a teacher not being armed, doing there job, and not having to worry about a gunman bursting in to their classroom because disturbed individuals are getting the treatment they need.

I suspect our large and ethnically diverse population has something to do with it. Most countries don't have that, either.

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Most of these school shooters are white males... how does our diversity play into it?

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