Who's job is it to make your kid's school safe?
Is it the President's Is it Congress's?
I would propose that it's your school, school district, school board, and your responsibility to make your kid's school safe.
It is certainly not the NRA's job, or Marco Rubio, both of whom (Dana Loesch in the NRA's role) were jumped all over at the CNN "Town Hall" last night on CNN.
**edit - now we know just how badly the local sheriff's office failed and what a tool (elected Democrat) Broward County Sheriff Israel is. It was his job.
Seriously, Columbine was in 1999. Since then, there have been all these school mass shootings (and I personally limit my discussion to the mass shootings, as the little individual gun incidents are fundamentally a different type of thing entirely) and there has not been substantive change since then. Why not?
I would suggest a different way of looking at the situation. I've mentioned the famous story of the statistician brought in to help with protecting bomber planes. I think we need to stop looking at the schools where shootings have happened and look at the schools where they havent'. Don't look at what the kids that made it out alive did to survive, look at what the victims did and learn to not do that. That's more applicable in other types of crime scenarios maybe, but still, I think we are just looking at it backwards, even if I'm not sure what the better view is. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy may also avoided at all costs, as we assume meaning to clusters of data that may just be random as ignore other data that may be contradictory yet helpful.
I offer this story as one step in that direction. My question is, do the students feel like it's a prison rather that a school, because I am not an advocate for that.
As I've said, when I was a teacher in the early 2000s, I floated the idea that having some teachers armed on a rotating basis so that even if the students knew who the "school marshalls" were (I never had the thought to compare them to the air marshalls, which is a great communication win) they wouldn't know which teacher or teachers were carrying on any given day. Glad to see the world has caught up with me.
The president's suggestion that some teachers be armed has led to the predictable howls from the lefties, including teachers in my feeds. If I were the type to engage them on social media, I'd say this:
If that's how you feel, then know that you aren't a teacher that either should be or will be asked to participate in the program. One additional reason is that you don't know that teachers are already armed, you really aren't informed enough. Lastly, three teachers in this most recent school shooting (Stoneman Douglas) sacrificed their lives for their students, one of whom was a CCW holder, another a veteran and Navy reservist while the actual officers cowered, so absolutely I would trust teachers to defend their students with deadly force more than the people you want to, and more than you do. Aaron Feis, Chris Hixon, and Scott Beigel are heroes, the Broward County Sheriff and Deputies are not.
