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People who support arming teachers ... LAX shooter was a teacher .. expect resistance

Primus

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What? Might want to change your thread title. According to that article, a shooting VICTIM was a teacher (29 year old male). It doesn't say what the shooter does.
 

Brace

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I've had teachers assault me without real cause (ie for talking back to them), so I do have some skepticism about giving them firearms. Schools have practically evolved into prisons already. If you give teachers guns they'll end up shooting kids with dangerously suggestive pop-tarts, justifying it by saying they were bad kids with long records of suspensions and referrals. It's not just a matter of trusting people to be responsible, it's already a context where adults have absolute control over a group of people who can often prove difficult to manage, and where they also have the ability to define the official narrative, with all of the implications of these things. I trust law-abiding strangers not to shoot each other but if someone's job features violence with any sort of regularity then if you introduce a gun into that position, it will lead to shootings to some extent or another. Every single one of them will be classified as "defensive", mind you, but that won't mean anything. Better to just accept x number of dead kids a year than to create a situation where love of justice and order kills even more, buries not only their bodies but their memories, spits on their graves, and then normalizes the whole thing on a massive scale.
 
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Primus

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I've had teachers assault me without real cause (ie for talking back to them), so I do have some skepticism about giving them firearms. Schools have practically evolved into prisons already. If you give teachers guns they'll end up shooting kids with dangerously suggestive pop-tarts, justifying it by saying they were bad kids with long records of suspensions and referrals. It's not just a matter of trusting people to be responsible, it's already a context where adults have absolute control over a group of people who can often prove difficult to manage, and where they also have the ability to define the official narrative, with all of the implications of these things. I trust law-abiding strangers not to shoot each other but if someone's job features violence with any sort of regularity then if you introduce a gun into that position, it will lead to shootings to some extent or another. Every single one of them will be classified as "defensive", mind you, but that won't mean anything. Better to just accept x number of dead kids a year than to create a situation where love of justice and order kills even more, buries not only their bodies but their memories, spits on their graves, and then normalizes the whole thing on a massive scale.

Good view of it, honestly never thought of it from that angle. But what if a teacher just chooses to carry based on 2a? I'm honestly on the fence about it either way.
 

Brace

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Good view of it, honestly never thought of it from that angle. But what if a teacher just chooses to carry based on 2a? I'm honestly on the fence about it either way.

I have less trouble with the concept of security officers and increasing the number of security officers, both because they're trained and because they don't interact with the kids in any other sort of capacity (compartmentalization of duties is plainly important here). I also think individual citizens should be allowed to carry on school grounds. It's not guns in school that bothers me, it's teachers with guns that bothers me.
 

Citizen

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Good view of it, honestly never thought of it from that angle. But what if a teacher just chooses to carry based on 2a? I'm honestly on the fence about it either way.

Pose the question thus: does a teacher have as much right to defend their lives as anyone else?

Regarding violent teachers, Isreal doesn't forbid teachers carrying.
 

marshaul

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I had a teacher in a public high school throw a chair at me (or at least, in my direction, but with not quite enough velocity to reach me). I might fire him, but if I didn't I would not hesitate to allow him to be armed.
 
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HPmatt

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I had a teacher in a public high school throw a chair at me (or at least, in my direction, but with not quite enough velocity to reach me).

Now you're getting into the subject area of allowing students t/b armed. By the time you are a Sr, if your relatives gave you one you could OC in many states, if you were held back for football reasons, perhaps you could be a Junior. Then by college age would expect a lot students able to carry and would entail more civility from profs, like the libs English prof ranting at Mich State U about conservatives.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortne...publicans-dying-white-people-in-rant-n1692063
 

marshaul

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Now you're getting into the subject area of allowing students t/b armed. By the time you are a Sr, if your relatives gave you one you could OC in many states, if you were held back for football reasons, perhaps you could be a Junior. Then by college age would expect a lot students able to carry and would entail more civility from profs, like the libs English prof ranting at Mich State U about conservatives.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortne...publicans-dying-white-people-in-rant-n1692063

Well, seeing as an armed society is a polite society, I suspect all chairs would have remain firmly rooted to the floor had I been armed that day. :)
 
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Primus

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I have less trouble with the concept of security officers and increasing the number of security officers, both because they're trained and because they don't interact with the kids in any other sort of capacity (compartmentalization of duties is plainly important here). I also think individual citizens should be allowed to carry on school grounds. It's not guns in school that bothers me, it's teachers with guns that bothers me.

Makes sense. I think I could get behind that.
 

marshaul

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I have less trouble with the concept of security officers and increasing the number of security officers, both because they're trained and because they don't interact with the kids in any other sort of capacity (compartmentalization of duties is plainly important here). I also think individual citizens should be allowed to carry on school grounds. It's not guns in school that bothers me, it's teachers with guns that bothers me.

I could in many ways see this as a likely outcome, but I wonder what your reasoning is – you, personally.

Are the teachers too close to (i.e. potentially emotionally affected by) the students?

I dunno. When I read your post my initial instinct was to agree easily. But then, after some thought, I find myself wondering why it ought to be any different from my normal "good people should be armed where they will" stance.

Are teachers not already able to bring guns into school and shoot their students – practically, though not legally? Does any law in addition to the one prohibiting murder really affect that to any meaningful degree? Wouldn't this just be another form of inefficacious and fundamentally-missing-the-point gun control?
 
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Brace

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Oct 1, 2013
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Colorado
I could in many ways see this as a likely outcome, but I wonder what your reasoning is – you, personally.

Are the teachers too close to (i.e. potentially emotionally affected by) the students?

I dunno. When I read your post my initial instinct was to agree easily. But then, after some thought, I find myself wondering why it ought to be any different from my normal "good people should be armed where they will" stance.

Are teachers not already able to bring guns into school and shoot their students – practically, though not legally? Does any law in addition to the one prohibiting murder really affect that to any meaningful degree? Wouldn't this just be another form of inefficacious and fundamentally-missing-the-point gun control?

I just see the situation as different. Once upon a time it was no big deal for guns to be in schools, but there was no pretension of them being there for defense. They were there because students would find it more convenient if they wanted to go hunting or shooting later, or because there was a rifle club on campus, things like that. Then the world was perceived to have become more dangerous (and partly, but to a far lesser degree actually was more dangerous), so guns were removed under the pretense they contributed to danger. Now the world is perceived to have become even more dangerous than that, and guns are being put back into schools as part of a security culture.

It's the relationship and the culture that worries me. Israeli teachers were mentioned, but those guns aren't in those schools with the notion that they might be turned against students, they're there with the notion that they'll be turned against terrorists. This is also in a country which is largely homogeneous and has extreme cultural solidarity and cohesion, not the vast cultural salad bowl of the United States. Teachers in the United States don't just have to teach, they have to keep the peace. They do this with kids who start fights, name call, ignore instructions, go wherever they like, destroy property, do drugs and have sex on school grounds, and just generally do the very best anyone could possibly do to infuriate people who have little recourse but to try and entice cooperation or else call the police. Teachers are almost never genuinely in fear for their lives from students though, which is where a gun is supposed to matter. The risk in my mind is therefore that the gun becomes a compliance tool, or that teachers resort to it under emotional stress. Police do this, and they're trained and know the law.

I just see the separate duties of teaching, maintaining compliance with school policy, and protecting the student body as producing significant enough conflicts of interest to where a single person shouldn't be trusted with all of them simultaneously. To the notion that teachers have a right to self-defense, when it's on the job I'm not sure that they do. They should be protected, just as the students should be protected, but if their ability to effectively do their job is compromised by being armed (which I think it is to an extent), and they're not willing to go unarmed in order to do that job effectively, I think they should find a different line of work. This is also a system that's prone to abuse simply because it deals so nakedly in power and has limited transparency. I'm not comfortable introducing guns into situations like that. Liberty minded people are already stuck with the difficult task of trying to police the police, the de facto deputizing of another group of civil servants into such a position seems like a bad recipe to me, especially in our present culture where a young teenager is as liable to be treated as a potential threat needing to be controlled as they are a human being needing knowledge and guidance. If a teacher wanted to bring a gun to school now, they would be assumed to be in the wrong and would have the chance to vindicate themselves before a jury of their peers. If they were permitted to carry guns then they would have the benefit of the doubt in murky situations as well as the ability to make these situations however murky they like.

It's worth noting that this debate wouldn't even be necessary were it not for the governmental nature of public schools. As it stands, policy about issues like this on the federal level could have untold national ramifications.
 
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sudden valley gunner

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I trust law-abiding strangers not to shoot each other but if someone's job features violence with any sort of regularity then if you introduce a gun into that position, it will lead to shootings to some extent or another. Every single one of them will be classified as "defensive", mind you, but that won't mean anything. Better to just accept x number of dead kids a year than to create a situation where love of justice and order kills even more, buries not only their bodies but their memories, spits on their graves, and then normalizes the whole thing on a massive scale.

This principle can apply to any agent of the state too.
 
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