Posted by CNN via e-mail on Monday, October2, 2006 at 1:23 pm
The county coroner says at least six people were killed in a shooting at an Amish school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, The Associated Press reports. Visit CNN for the latest.
Schools and federal buildings are the only places I can’t legally carry my defense handgun. Everyone knows that schools are defenseless, is it any surprise that cowards pick the easiest target?
Yeah. If it weren’t for the laws, those pacificist Amish would be packing heat.
You have a much better idea. Give every overly emotional, immature 15-year-old a handgun to take to school. That ought to solve the problem of school violence.
Oh please. “Overly emotional, immature 15-year-olds?” Was ceiliazul suggesting arming them?. A trained security guard, on the other hand, and maybe Columbine would have turned out better.
There was an armed security guard at Columbine. A lot of good that did.
Maybe it shouldn’t get to a point where there is a shoot-out in a school library. Maybe when kids are building bombs and sawing off shotguns in the garage, the parents should step in. If not, the law should make the parents accountable to do something before it gets too late. If the parents can’t, the kids should be locked up.
At Columbine, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold engaged one pistol-armed guard with carbine firearms when they were out of his range. But there are many more examples of armed civilians preventing bloodshed in similar circumstances. For example, in 1997 principal Joel Myrick prevented Luke Woodham from killing students at Pearl Junior High by getting the handgun from his truck, loading it and holding it on Woodham until authorities arrived, thereby saving numerous lives. Another example is the shooting spree which occurred at Appalachian School of Law in 2002, which ended only after several students separately ran to their cars to get their handguns and confront the shooter, Peter Odighizuwa (for a full account, see http://www.uwire.com/content/topops012402002.html). But perhaps the best example comes from Israel, where teachers and parent volunteers have heen carrying concealed handguns since a school massacre at Maalot that left 25 dead and 66 wounded over 3 decades ago. In the time period since, no child has been harmed by gunfire on an Israeli schoolground. The only incident in which Israeli kids have been shot occurred on a field trip to, ironically, the “Zone of Peace” at the Jordanian border. The Jordanians had insisted that the teachers and escorts leave their guns at home; the Israelis complied and they were helpless when an Arab terrorist opened fire on the children.
To quote Cesare Beccaria, the father of modern criminology: “An unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” Responsible armed adults on school property can save lives.
While I believe in an ideal situation an intelligent, trained civilian with immediate access to a handgun might make sense, the fact is most people who own guns aren’t trained or they are simply neglectful. For every story you tell me about some guy who defended himself with a gun, I can give you hundreds of stories of kids accidentally killing each other with their dad’s loaded and unsecured gun. Heck, not that long ago a toddler killed himself when he got access to his father’s service revolver…Secret Service revolver…while the guy slept with it hanging from his holster at the foot of his bed.
Introducing MORE guns into schools is only going to INCREASE the odds of innocent people getting killed with them, not decrease them.
“The fact is most people who own guns aren’t trained or they are simply neglectful.”
Hah. I would love to know the basis for that merely conclusory assertion. While I currently own no firearms myself, having grown up in a household with multiple firearms and having associated with numerous gun clubs and organizations, I can tell you from personal experience that all of the law-abiding civilians who own guns that I’ve ever known take training and safety very seriously. Anyone with more than a superficial knowledge of the NRA, for example, knows that firearms safety and certification is what catapulted that organization to national prominence in the past 40 years. The fact of the matter is that for every nimrod parent who keeps a loaded and gun where their kid may stumble upon it, there are tens of thousands more who secure their guns properly.
“Introducing MORE guns into schools is only going to INCREASE the odds of innocent people getting killed with them, not decrease them.”
Really? How do you know this? While the loaded (pardon the pun) phraseology of “introducing more guns into schools” sounds intuitively bad, can you cite ONE SINGLE INCIDENT of gun violence arising (or being exacerbated) at a school due to a security guard being armed with a gun?
I agree with Joe Mama, nearly every legally carried handgun I know of is carried with understanding of safety and consequences of pulling the trigger. As with every other subset of people, the stupid/deviant 2% make headlines.
In my home state of Washington, 5% of us have concealed handgun permits. If teachers were a representative portion, a high school school with 200 employees could have 10 staff members able to stop a shooter.
Now, teacher training does not include SWAT tactics, but just being there is a deterrent. Image two schools side by side, each with a sign out front:
1) “No guns, knives, or other weapons may be carried onto these premises.”
2) “Based on state & county statistics, ten members of our staff are legally and safely carry a handgun on their body.”
…if your goal was to murder as many people as possible today, which school would you attack?
Of course we could always try and put in place effective gun control laws and limit the number of guns in this country, make the process of buying one involve things like, oh i don’t know, ACTUAL TRAINING AND LICENSCING like we do cars. But no, we have people who cling like mad to the Second Ammendment because clearly if we get rid of that the government will take away all our guns and turn tyranical on us. Not withstanding numerous countries such as Canada where you can legally own guns and the fact that if the government wanted to they could turn tanks andmissles against us. How much good is your semi-auto pistol going to do you then, eh?
Guns have one purpose and one purpose alone, to kill. And while i know and can appreciate responsible gun owners and have no problem with passing laws which allow them to own guns, the idea that it should be an inalienable (or nearly so) right is the worst mistake our founding fathers could have made, although given what they knew at the time i can’t blame them for it. Instead I blame the people in todays world who refuse to see that unfettered or nearly so access to guns is a bad thing.
“Guns have one purpose and one purpose alone, to kill.”
False. Tens of thousands of guns are used only for competitive target shooting, informal target shooting, skill competitions and historical reenactments.
“And while i know and can appreciate responsible gun owners and have no problem with passing laws which allow them to own guns, the idea that it should be an inalienable (or nearly so) right is the worst mistake our founding fathers could have made, although given what they knew at the time i can’t blame them for it.”
Sure you can, David. The founding fathers justified the right to bear arms primarily on the basis of potential government corruption and the possible need for revolution, but they nonetheless were quite familiar with the argument most frequently used against gun control today (i.e., that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns). Cesare Beccaria, who I quoted above, was an 18th-century Italian philosopher whose work had a considerable influence on the founding fathers and the development of U.S. law. I would strongly suggest reading “Of Crimes and Punishments,” published in 1764, excerpts of which set forth precisely this rationale a good 25 years before the Second Amendment was even proposed.
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October 2nd, 2006 at 4:17:37 pm
4 times this month!
Schools and federal buildings are the only places I can’t legally carry my defense handgun. Everyone knows that schools are defenseless, is it any surprise that cowards pick the easiest target?
October 2nd, 2006 at 7:03:33 pm
ceiliazul-
Yeah. If it weren’t for the laws, those pacificist Amish would be packing heat.
You have a much better idea. Give every overly emotional, immature 15-year-old a handgun to take to school. That ought to solve the problem of school violence.
October 2nd, 2006 at 10:28:46 pm
Oh please. “Overly emotional, immature 15-year-olds?” Was ceiliazul suggesting arming them?. A trained security guard, on the other hand, and maybe Columbine would have turned out better.
October 2nd, 2006 at 11:31:06 pm
Joe Mama-
There was an armed security guard at Columbine. A lot of good that did.
Maybe it shouldn’t get to a point where there is a shoot-out in a school library. Maybe when kids are building bombs and sawing off shotguns in the garage, the parents should step in. If not, the law should make the parents accountable to do something before it gets too late. If the parents can’t, the kids should be locked up.
October 3rd, 2006 at 12:14:02 am
A&A,
At Columbine, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold engaged one pistol-armed guard with carbine firearms when they were out of his range. But there are many more examples of armed civilians preventing bloodshed in similar circumstances. For example, in 1997 principal Joel Myrick prevented Luke Woodham from killing students at Pearl Junior High by getting the handgun from his truck, loading it and holding it on Woodham until authorities arrived, thereby saving numerous lives. Another example is the shooting spree which occurred at Appalachian School of Law in 2002, which ended only after several students separately ran to their cars to get their handguns and confront the shooter, Peter Odighizuwa (for a full account, see http://www.uwire.com/content/topops012402002.html). But perhaps the best example comes from Israel, where teachers and parent volunteers have heen carrying concealed handguns since a school massacre at Maalot that left 25 dead and 66 wounded over 3 decades ago. In the time period since, no child has been harmed by gunfire on an Israeli schoolground. The only incident in which Israeli kids have been shot occurred on a field trip to, ironically, the “Zone of Peace” at the Jordanian border. The Jordanians had insisted that the teachers and escorts leave their guns at home; the Israelis complied and they were helpless when an Arab terrorist opened fire on the children.
To quote Cesare Beccaria, the father of modern criminology: “An unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” Responsible armed adults on school property can save lives.
October 3rd, 2006 at 9:20:07 am
Joe Mama-
While I believe in an ideal situation an intelligent, trained civilian with immediate access to a handgun might make sense, the fact is most people who own guns aren’t trained or they are simply neglectful. For every story you tell me about some guy who defended himself with a gun, I can give you hundreds of stories of kids accidentally killing each other with their dad’s loaded and unsecured gun. Heck, not that long ago a toddler killed himself when he got access to his father’s service revolver…Secret Service revolver…while the guy slept with it hanging from his holster at the foot of his bed.
Introducing MORE guns into schools is only going to INCREASE the odds of innocent people getting killed with them, not decrease them.
October 3rd, 2006 at 9:54:33 am
“The fact is most people who own guns aren’t trained or they are simply neglectful.”
Hah. I would love to know the basis for that merely conclusory assertion. While I currently own no firearms myself, having grown up in a household with multiple firearms and having associated with numerous gun clubs and organizations, I can tell you from personal experience that all of the law-abiding civilians who own guns that I’ve ever known take training and safety very seriously. Anyone with more than a superficial knowledge of the NRA, for example, knows that firearms safety and certification is what catapulted that organization to national prominence in the past 40 years. The fact of the matter is that for every nimrod parent who keeps a loaded and gun where their kid may stumble upon it, there are tens of thousands more who secure their guns properly.
“Introducing MORE guns into schools is only going to INCREASE the odds of innocent people getting killed with them, not decrease them.”
Really? How do you know this? While the loaded (pardon the pun) phraseology of “introducing more guns into schools” sounds intuitively bad, can you cite ONE SINGLE INCIDENT of gun violence arising (or being exacerbated) at a school due to a security guard being armed with a gun?
October 3rd, 2006 at 10:47:32 am
I agree with Joe Mama, nearly every legally carried handgun I know of is carried with understanding of safety and consequences of pulling the trigger. As with every other subset of people, the stupid/deviant 2% make headlines.
In my home state of Washington, 5% of us have concealed handgun permits. If teachers were a representative portion, a high school school with 200 employees could have 10 staff members able to stop a shooter.
Now, teacher training does not include SWAT tactics, but just being there is a deterrent. Image two schools side by side, each with a sign out front:
1) “No guns, knives, or other weapons may be carried onto these premises.”
2) “Based on state & county statistics, ten members of our staff are legally and safely carry a handgun on their body.”
…if your goal was to murder as many people as possible today, which school would you attack?
October 3rd, 2006 at 5:46:11 pm
Of course we could always try and put in place effective gun control laws and limit the number of guns in this country, make the process of buying one involve things like, oh i don’t know, ACTUAL TRAINING AND LICENSCING like we do cars. But no, we have people who cling like mad to the Second Ammendment because clearly if we get rid of that the government will take away all our guns and turn tyranical on us. Not withstanding numerous countries such as Canada where you can legally own guns and the fact that if the government wanted to they could turn tanks andmissles against us. How much good is your semi-auto pistol going to do you then, eh?
Guns have one purpose and one purpose alone, to kill. And while i know and can appreciate responsible gun owners and have no problem with passing laws which allow them to own guns, the idea that it should be an inalienable (or nearly so) right is the worst mistake our founding fathers could have made, although given what they knew at the time i can’t blame them for it. Instead I blame the people in todays world who refuse to see that unfettered or nearly so access to guns is a bad thing.
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:11:30 pm
“Guns have one purpose and one purpose alone, to kill.”
False. Tens of thousands of guns are used only for competitive target shooting, informal target shooting, skill competitions and historical reenactments.
“And while i know and can appreciate responsible gun owners and have no problem with passing laws which allow them to own guns, the idea that it should be an inalienable (or nearly so) right is the worst mistake our founding fathers could have made, although given what they knew at the time i can’t blame them for it.”
Sure you can, David. The founding fathers justified the right to bear arms primarily on the basis of potential government corruption and the possible need for revolution, but they nonetheless were quite familiar with the argument most frequently used against gun control today (i.e., that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns). Cesare Beccaria, who I quoted above, was an 18th-century Italian philosopher whose work had a considerable influence on the founding fathers and the development of U.S. law. I would strongly suggest reading “Of Crimes and Punishments,” published in 1764, excerpts of which set forth precisely this rationale a good 25 years before the Second Amendment was even proposed.