Solutions?

So after a somewhat heated debate on facebook today after the horrific shooting in a CT Elem. School, the first reaction by some of my friends was more gun control. Of course I don't think this is a solution to the problem of mass shootings, and explained why it was nothing more than a feel-good knee-jerk reaction to call for bans on assault rifles/high cap magazines. So I thought this is a time to get some ideas. Please be civil, everyone has an opinion. If you disagree with an opinion, ask for explanation on why they believe what they believe, take it in, then explain your position. In the end you still may not agree, but at least this doesn't become a hate filled name calling festival.

My position/thoughts.... Gun Control in my book is pointless and unrealistic. There something like 300 million guns in this country, millions of them are so called "assault rifles". Not getting into the 2nd ammendment part of this debate, the reality is you can ban all the new sales of these weapons and the large cap magazines, but you will never get rid of the millions already out in the population. All it will serve to do is kill a lot of jobs in the firearms manufacturing and retail parts of our society. You can try and ban them all together...but frankly few will get rid of their own weapons voluntarily in this day and age and good luck finding people who will go out and try and take them away from people. To me, the idea of gun control is like saying you are going to go out and round up every single illegal immigrant in the country and ship them back to wherever they came from...its just not going to happen.

So we must then look to solutions, or, at least a better plan. Frankly, I don't think we will ever be able to stop these from happening. We can minimize them, both with better proactive approaches, and with better security. You could put a cop in every school in America, make it more secure with say only one secured entrance. Camera systems only monitor not prevent or react to a shooting. Of course this would cost a lot of money in a bad economy. You know, I do find it interesting how municipalities around the country keep cutting officers, expect them to do more and wonder why more and more incidents like this occur. How many people have seen their department budgets shrink, forcing departments to cut their school liason officers? But perhaps that is the solution for now, put at least one officer in every school and let them deal with the security. There would be likely an added benefit... intel. For those who have been or spoken to liason officers, know that a ton of crimes get solved/prevented by the intel these officers get talking to the kids at school, and having a report with them. According to a google search, there are approximately 99,000 K-12 schools in the USA. Given an average salary/benefits package of an officer it would cost about $6.5 billion annually to accomplish this. Figure in perhaps another $1 Billion for added security measures such as metal detectors, etc. Given we have a $4 Trillion dollar budget I hardly think that is such a tall order. Heck we probably spend more than that on researching sheep farts in Jenna's back yard.

Anyways...what are some of your ideas?

I'm absolutely in favor of more gun control. Give more people control of more guns.

Let's arm the teachers, and teach them to shoot. Give them control of guns. Bet that'll cut down on some of this.

And I'm not joking as much as it might seem when I say that.

Beyond that -- we need a real mental health system. We all know how ineffective mental health care is in way too many cases. The folks who are actually helped are the handful who want to be helped. The rest? Not much you can do. I'm not 100% sure what to do -- but the current deinstitutionalization ain't working. We've got too many ticking time bombs out there.

Of course -- there's still too little known about why this happened. Maybe he wasn't mentally ill -- just had too much of his mom spending her time kids she was teaching. Or some other screwball justification that doesn't reach the realm of mental illness.

People need to stop hiding in denial when they know someone is a nut, even if it is their own kid. A massive undertaking needs to be done promoting concealed carry and training. Arm as many people as will carry and be trained. Then it doesn't matter what nut shows up with a gun. Someone else, who has been trained, will pull one too and stop it. I'm tired of seeing the bad guy shoot till they kill themselves. A trained armed citizen or officer needs to be the one to do it.

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Originally Posted by lewisipso

People need to stop hiding in denial when they know someone is a nut, even if it is their own kid. A massive undertaking needs to be done promoting concealed carry and training. Arm as many people as will carry and be trained. Then it doesn't matter what nut shows up with a gun. Someone else, who has been trained, will pull one too and stop it. I'm tired of seeing the bad guy shoot till they kill themselves. A trained armed citizen or officer needs to be the one to do it.

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This plus 1...

Lew, I agree that SOMETHING needs to be done, but the fact is that the majority of people not only don't know how to defend or protect themselves , they assume someone else, ( like you) will do it for them. Given our training and choice of professions, we are more prepared to confront such evil. Most people aren't.

I expect there will be a knee jerk reaction, and some changes in your gun control laws, because Politicians will want to be seen to be acting.

However, I don't think it will be an answer.

In the UK we already had strict gun control, but after a couple of incidents (with illegally held weapons), the Politicians over reacted and removed private ownership of pistols and rifles, from the Law abiding public.

That cannot happen in the US, as has already been said. The answer? No idea.

One way entry doors with metal detectors. Bulletproof, lockable classroom doors, that can be controlled from a central location, maybe would help limit the movement of any gunman that did get in. Arming teachers could be a double edged sword, as it could provide a firearm for the aggressor in the first place.

I think people will just have to realise not much can be done and that it will happen again.

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Originally Posted by Trojan 42

I think people will just have to realise not much can be done and that it will happen again.

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That's not an acceptable answer.

I'm going to steal a page from Dave Grossman. We don't say "we have to accept that it's going to happen" about fire deaths. We mandate sprinklers, alarms, fire resistant construction, and more to make it damn hard to die in a fire.

We have to take the same approach to the safety of our children, especially, from violence in schools. Control access. Provide safe escape routes. Get people in there to respond when this shit goes down. And we need to deal with the situations outside, too. We need an effective mental health system that doesn't simply serve as a revolving door. We need to pay attention to what's going on, and stop the shitbirds before they can do any harm. Most importantly -- we can't have a "this happens" attitude, but have to fight every moment to prevent it.

I'm not advocating turning our nation into some sort of armed camp. Nor am I pushing for some sort of paranoid conformacy police. But we can't assume this "doesn't happen here" and stick our heads in the sand, either. It's a complex, multifaceted problem, and it'll demand a multifaceted answer.

The one common theme in all these shootings is they are soft targets. Shooters to in, do their damage then suck start their weapon when they either accomplish their goal or are confronted. If we stop making these places soft and "touchy feely" places this will help protect them. These deranged people will look elsewhere for their statements. As long as we keep these schools / malls and such "gun free" and deny law abiding citizens their God given right to defend themselves then incidents like these will continue.

Jks.
It is the only answer. You may not like it, nor do I, but it is true. Even placing an armed guard at every school entrance could not guarantee it.

Making schools like Fort Knox would help. But then what about school buses? Or sports fields/events?
And then you have theatres, hospitals, sports arenas etc.etc.

Mental health care is not the issue, as most of these gunman show no signs of a problem serious enough to warrant intervention.

Gun control cannot work in the US as there are too many weapons already out in the public domain.

When I worked Close Protection we knew that if someone wanted to kill our VIP, they could. There is always a way. Our job was to make as hard as possible, but there is no such thing as 100% security.

Same with these mass shooting incidents, there will always be a way. Take away guns, they'll use something else. Knives, bombs, cars, anything they can imagine.

I'm not saying do nothing, just be realistic about the outcome of any actions taken.

As cops the best we can do is train the best we can. Keep fit and shoot a lot!

Practise in the dark, in smoke, wearing respirators (gas masks) and any other extremes you can think of. (I've shot on ranges in the dark, with the sprinkler system on, smoke grenades and thunder flashes being thrown and strobe car lights running. And having a life sized dummy to drag round with me).

So it's coming out the Stillborn (not saying his name) couldn't legally obtain a gun so he killed his mom and took hers. So much for regulating the law abiding.

Arm the teachers. Get armed security guards. Harden doors and windows. The body count is only going to go up as the nut jobs try to out do each other in notoriety.

We as a society need to erase the mystique and taboo of guns. Most children grow up seeing them only as weapons on TV or in movies. Then as toys as they get older. If we had proper firearms safety training in our schools, it would go a long way to remove that mystique. Let kids, supervised of course, handle weapons. Shoot them.

The next step is to let teachers, law-abiding parents, school staff, etc carry concealed if they want to.

If you tell a would-be shooter that School A is gun-free and that School B has randomly armed people in it, he's going to go for the low-hanging fruit.

An armed society is a polite society.

Having read now the third version of events through our trusty press I'm still not sure about the specifics. Other than being a glaring media failure, I'm not sure how much it matters though. A murderer killed many people.

Drudge had a link that made a point, about 22 schoolchildren in China being slashed with a knife the same day. And now ABC news is spinning that by buying (through direct payment or SEO) the top link to their blog which makes the point everyone lived. Golly gee, a madman broke into a school with a lethal weapon intent on harm and it wasn't so bad! But look back and you'll find 21 dead in school attacks with no guns used. Instead these children died by knife, cleaver or hammer blow. These are the stories that manages to slip past their extraordinarily controlled press.

Also slipping through the Great Firewall of China were mass executions of dissidents - people who would have bored Occupy with their demands. Oh how they would have loved a 1st Amendment. And how they would have defended it with a 2nd Amendment rather than being herded off to their slaughter.

I'm not saying we're going to become China if we get more gun control. I'm saying they have absolute gun control and their children die with hammers crushing their skulls. MURDER IS UNIVERSAL. As Trojan said, if someone wants to kill bad enough they will. This isn't bowing to evil, this is recognizing it truthfully. Let us work with what is real.

2c
Rest well all the victims.

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Originally Posted by lewisipso

People need to stop hiding in denial when they know someone is a nut, even if it is their own kid.

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Every once in while I really hate being right.

Gunman's mother kept trials of home life hidden

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — At the bar, everybody knew her name.
Nancy Lanza was the one who, if she heard you were short on cash, regularly offered to pick up the tab at My Place.
Two or three nights a week, Lanza — the mother of the gunman in Connecticut's horrific school massacre — came in for carryout salads, but stayed for Chardonnay and good humor. The divorced mother of two — still smooth-skinned and ash blonde at 52 — clearly didn't have to work, but was always glad to share talk of her beloved Red Sox, gardening and a growing enthusiasm for target shooting.
But while Lanza spoke proudly about her sons and brought them in for breakfast when they were younger, friends say she held one card very close: home life, especially its trials and setbacks, was off limits.
Now, the secrets Lanza kept are at the center of the questions that envelop this New England town, grieving over the slaughter unleashed by her 20-year-old son Adam, who investigators say killed his mother Friday with one of her own guns before murdering 26 children and teachers at a nearby school.
"Her family life was her family life. She kept it private, when we were together. That was her own thing," said Louise Tambascio, who runs the warmly lit pizzeria and bar with her own sons, and became a shopping and dining companion of Nancy Lanza's.
Friends had met Lanza's younger son, who stared down at the floor and didn't speak when she brought him in. They knew he'd switched schools more than once and that she'd tried home schooling him. But while she occasionally expressed concern about his future during evenings at the bar, she never complained about anything at all.
"I heard her as a parent. I always said that I wouldn't want to be in her shoes. But I thought, 'Wow. She holds it well,'" said Tambascio's son, John.
California resident Ryan Kraft told KCAL-TV in Los Angeles that when he was a teenager he lived a few doors down from the Lanza family and used to babysit Adam Lanza, then nine or 10 years old. He said the boy "struck me as an introverted kid."
Gunman's mother kept trials of home life hidden - Yahoo! News

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"His mom Nancy had always instructed me to keep an eye on him at all times, never turn my back or even go to the bathroom or anything like that. Which I found odd but I really didn't ask; it wasn't any of my business," said Kraft, who lives in Hermosa Beach. "But looking back at it now, I guess there was something else going on."

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