Be Excellent To Each Other

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His 'solutions' are the sort a five-year old would come up with. We don't want Mexicans crossing the border, build a big wall! As long as they don't realise planes exist, we're golden!

Bad guys shooting up schools? Arm teachers! Because more guns are better! Then someone reports an active shooter situation and a SWAT team shows up and ends up blowing away a bunch of teachers because they have no way of telling who the shooter is, apart from "he's holding a gun". Not to mention collateral damage, teachers shooting each other or kids accidentally.

You're a teacher, now potentially freshly armed due to American stupidity. Congratulations, you're now the first target for a shooter.

The wall's a stupid idea, but I don't think the stupid has anything to do with planes.

Anyone who's studying to be a teacher is going to have disciplines on the university about using guns?

Nice man Obama made me forget my anti-americanism for 8 years. Now it came back in full force.

Also, if you have anything less than a semi-auto assault rifle, like ALL of the high school shooters recently, it'll be a pointless exercise. It's actually very hard to hit anything with a pistol if it's more than 30-40 feet away.

Truly cretinous reasoning in defence of gun ownership.

In the late 80's, after the first school shooting with an assault rifle, George Bush Sr. tried to pass on congress a law to ban assault rifle sales to civilians. Ex-president Ronald Reagan gave his support.

Yes, this is true.

Also, someone could probably work out the Number of teachers * hours spent in classrooms per year * accidental discharge rate for non-expert gun users and see how many teachers will end up shooting their pupils.

I was a 5th grade math teacher for a year in 2009/2010. I'm sure i wanted to shoot many of the students on more that one occasion.

I was replacing one teacher that was on a medical leave due to severe depression. This idea can only end well.

Not forgetting that these teachers will be given training to actively shoot at their pupils.

I would imagine there's quite a psychological barrier that needs to be overcome to shoot a kid.

I was thinking, yesterday, about Trump and Fox & Friends. I don't think we can be too snobby over it when our politicians court Mumsnet.

I don't think Mrs May spends the first couple of hours of each day reading through it. Andrea Leadsome, probably, but not the prime minister. It's more a case of the President of the United States, with access to all material produced by the biggest set of intelligence bodies in the world, deciding to watch daytime television.

I bet he hasn't even asked about the Kennedy stuff yet.

I'm not a violent person but I think that if I was holding a gun and some kid was trying to shoot some other kids then I would be able to try and shoot them. I'm sure that I would feel terrible about it afterwards but yeah.

I've seen a number of former military or police firearms instructors give the idea of arming teachers an absolute shoeing on Twitter. This is a pretty good example:

https://twitter.com/KoolMoeSteve/status ... 7625972736

1/ On Wednesday I happened to have the TV on and saw the #ParklandShooting on the news from the moment in started. The last three days there's been numerous times where I've seen posts, videos, and interviews and I'm reduced to tears. There were brave kids, brave adults,

— Steve Halasz (@KoolMoeSteve) February 17, 2018

(that's a thread, click through for more)

There's also this stat:

https://twitter.com/VARGHANC/status/966622415680917504

NYPD's Firearms Discharge Report says in 2005, where officers intentionally fired a gun at a person, officers fired 472 times, hitting their mark 82 times, for a 17.4% hit rate! LAPD was better at 40%, but that means 3 out of 5 are missing their targets! https://t.co/o7qvmLJJEE

— Stephen Vargha (@VARGHANC) February 22, 2018

The idea of multiple armed teachers plugging away at a school shooter with a hit rate of less than 50% ought to give anyone pause for thought. Or are we going to give teachers superior firearms training to that received by armed police?

Yet, going into such detail on why it's a bad idea, such as giving accuracy rates of policemen, might give the impression that that at some point it could have seemed like a good idea. It's absolutely sheer lunacy and it speaks volumes on how we ended up here at this point.

But is there no one in the republican party that isn't a lobby puppet and is a functioning human being with conscience and empathy? What has John McCain said about this issue?

Yippie ki aye, muthafucker?

Love you.

Sadly, despite being somewhat centrist on many other issues, McCain has taken the most funding from the NRA of anyone in the Senate.

Playing Devil's Advocate, I'm not sure you can judge the police on their accuracy rate. I'd be interested to see similar statistics for UK armed police - although I guess it would have to be over more than one year as our "fire rates" are so much lower, and I don't know if shots with handguns are tracked separately, as AFOs are more likely to be using rifles than handguns, and therefore be more accurate almost by default.

Even with advanced training, it can be incredibly difficult to hit the broad side of a barn with a handgun. They're just not that accurate IMO. Add a high pressure situation and an adrenaline rush into the mix and it's a recipe for disaster.

That can't be right. The president of the US just said "ATTACKS WOULD END".

I'm not convinced that the shooting skills of teachers is even in the top ten of problems with this plan. If there was some way to magically place a gun into the hands of every innocent person at the scene when some gun nut decided to have a fucking malfunction then it might very well lead to fewer deaths. And this is how the gun lobby frame the debate. Completely ignoring all the other deaths that are obviously going to occur at all those other times if they were to put handguns in classrooms.

"I'm getting medical treatment", in as much as he's not been available due to medical treatment

That's not playing devil's advocate, it's actually something worth thinking about rather than being contrary for the sake of it.

Devil's Advocate doesn't mean being contrary for the sake of it.

For the sake of debate then. I assume Gaz actually believes what he has said though, which means it's not devil's advocate.

Devil's advocate typically means "these people are in the wrong here, but there are valid points that they are raising, allow me to discuss them"

It means Al Pacino chewing the scenery with admirable ferocity.

If you say so!

Whereas Devilled Advocaat is something else entirely, and potentially delicious.

You find this man delicious?

My 7 year old daughter just told me about a new game that they've learnt from the teachers at school called "Lockdown" where they hide under the desk until the teacher says "All clear".

I was speechless

Are you fucking serious?

...

Are you fucking serious?!

I can't even...

EDIT: Not the reference I was going for Giphy, but sufficiently illustrative if a little in poor taste.
Decided to remove. K.

WTF? I trust you've written an angry letter to the head.

I thought I was going to cry when she told me

That's absolutely crazy, unless the teacher was just using their initiative and they left the kids under there for like fifteen minutes while they went out for a smoke or something.

I only recently realised that this is the reason parents love the 'sleepy lions' game at kids' parties.

Apparently the teacher went under her own desk

The Big One thinks she is ace at hide and seek as I can't find her for ages

Yes, do this.

Yes.

More common than I thought. First entry on Google was a BBC report from 2017.

I appreciate the need for fire drills but this feels like a complete overreaction.

I'd probably copy in your local councillor, MP, and the appropriate council cabinet member too, although if it's an academy the local authority won't have any control over it.

Fucking hell, there was a policeman who apparently shat himself and milled around outside the school while that whole shooting in Florida happened.

Not sure what to think really. He's being vilified and I can see why, he failed to do his job. But on the other hand if he'd ran in and saved the day or ended up getting killed himself then he would have been an extraordinarily brave hero etc.

He could have probably saved more loves with an organised evacuation than going rabbit hunting. It goes against the "guns are good" narrative.

It's a fantasy based on all those films and TV shows where the hero walks in and with one shot resolves the situation.

I heard the story on the news this morning but haven't looked into it. He might just have been following his training and, after assessing the situation, decided it was too risky.

I have a feeling he probably was doing what he was trained to do, and waiting for backup. His boss has completely sold him down the river though and said he should have gone in and "killed the killer"

No, I'm pretty sure that's not right. They don't have armed police stationed at schools just to call the police.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... c3f5b1a7f4

"The deputy’s decision to remain outside breaks with police tactics for responding to active-shooting incidents. Ever since the 1999 attack at Colorado’s Columbine High School, authorities have emphasized the importance of pursuing the attacker or attackers quickly in an effort to eliminate the threat and prevent additional deaths."

I was wondering about the waiting for backup thing, if hand guns have a maximum 40% success rate, what chance would one cop have against someone with a semi automatic?