WatchMother of six says school kids deserve to be protected by armed, trained guards
“How do we protect our children?” NRA President Wayne LaPierre asked Friday morning, the one week anniversary of the horrific mass murders of 20 6- and 7-year-old students and 6 unarmed adults who died trying to protect them from the murderous rage of a coward.
Parents work to protect their kids almost every waking minute. We feed them healthy food to prevent obesity and illness, we brush their teeth to prevent cavities, we give them mittens and hats to protect them from the cold, we use child seats and seatbelts make them safer in car rides.
Politicians have touted gun-free zones as another way to protect children and other vulnerable members of society. Gun-free zones actually tell every insane killer in America the schools are the safer place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk, making children easy targets.
Law abiding citizens respect these laws, but psychopaths know that they are unlikely to face armed resistance if they attack a school.
When guns are wielded by the good guys, guns become the great equalizer for the vulnerable in our society. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun,” LaPierre said, “is a good guy with a gun,” adding, “Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away — or a minute away?”
Already, gun-rights opponents have begun scoffing at the notion of armed guards in our children’s schools. That doesn’t prevent the gun-rights opponent-in-chief from relying on a government-provided security detail to protect his own children.
On any given school day, no fewer than 6 marked Secret Service police cars surround the Sidwell Friends School, where the Obama girls attend. In these cars, good guys are ready to respond with deadly force to any threat of harm to the first daughters.
The Secret Service’s mere presence deters anyone who would attempt violence at the school founded by Quakers, who adhere to pacifism and nonviolent principles. In this haven of Northwest Washington, D.C., the pacifists depend on guns for protection.
In the same way, citizens of states with concealed-carry laws benefit from lower rates of violent crime. In jurisdictions where law-abiding citizens carry guns, everyone is safer because violent criminals do not know who may or may not be armed. Even those without firearms are less likely to be raped, shot or murdered.
Those who carry a concealed firearm add a layer of protection for all of us, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us.
Parents should demand that communities use the tools we already have available to protect our kids. Armed and trained security guards in every school would assure that all of our kids enjoy a measure of protection similar to what the president rightly provides for his daughters.
Already, the 20,000 different gun laws on the books are not enforced enough, and they certainly did not stop last week’s tragedy.
We have armed guards at banks, airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses, and sports stadiums — but not schools. “How have our nation’s priorities gotten so far out of order?” LaPierre asked.
He’s right. No one objects to protecting bank lobbies or celebrities. We should all the more protect our most valuable gifts, our children.
We did, after all, form our government to “insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
If the federal government cannot keep our kids safe, it’s simply not doing its job.
And what about other contributing factors to our violent society? Children are not safer from wall-to-wall media coverage of mass murderers. Children are not safer from increasingly gruesome and realistic video games.
Children are not safer from violent movies and television programming. Children are not safer from the lax enforcement of 20,000 gun laws already on the books.
“We must speak for the safety of our nation’s children,” La Pierre said as he opened his remarks. As a concerned mother, I ask why we need the NRA to speak for our children?
We ask ourselves each day how to protect our children. Banks, airports and rock concerts already know how to do this.
Let’s put guns into the hands of trained school guards who can protect our children. No more easy targets.
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Ha ha - gotta love Fox News.
Funny, the conservatives screaming about "freedom" are the same ones who want a police state. I would rather be dead than spend my whole life surrounded by armed guards. If I wanted that, I'd move to Israel. Does nobody get that a lot of us don't WANT to take off our fucking shoes, put our toothpaste in plastic bags, get scanned with a lethal dose of radiation, and get randomly strip searched whenever they feel like it, just because we dared to go to the airport? Now are they going to make our schools like that too? It's truly sad what this country is becoming.
"Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither."
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male
Homeboy says
Exactly... they are such fools.
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The extreme right wing always wants a police state.
They smear the left with this all the time. But it's them.
The left is fighting for a reasonable solution, that is not a police state solution.
Nobody wants that on the ctr left.
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Nuttin for nuttin, but I've been to many countries where every where you go there are armed guards with military riffles, just off in the wings. They aren't there to be in the way, and impede the pedestrian flow, asking everyone for credential. But they are imposing enough that every one understands, that there wont be any shit, that they wont finish. And that's just the guys that you see.
We could learn a lot from these countries. We put a 6 ft tall 300lb Abner in the door way, frisking everyone with a metal detector, harassing all of the law abiding folks. When the truth is, if anyone was there to reek havoc, he would just be first person that gets shot.
It really is just a big waste of time, and not very well thought out or smart.
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The left is fighting for an unHomeboy says
The police state transcends so-called "liberal" and "conservative" boundaries. Domestically it's a bi-partisan effort - 98 of 100 Senators voted for the USA PATRIOT Act. Travel to so-called "socialist" countries in Europe and you'll see airport police with HK MP5 sub machine guns.
When it comes to police in schools it's about priorities for me. Given a choice I'd do absolutely nothing. The number of people killed in mass shootings is inconsequential and ought to be correspondingly low on our list of priorities.
Children are 80 times more likely to drown than be killed in a school shooting, and if we really cared about them we'd put them in drown proofing or swimming classes.
Unfortunately people are illogical and insisting we do _something_ that _feels good_. I'll take something which might make a difference with minimal effect on me (police in schools) over something which won't (the last so-called assault weapon ban did nothing positive for crime) and will.
Things like these are often package deals. I'll take reduced gun control even if it comes with restrictions on abortions (I can afford to fly women in my family to free states and countries), no gay marriage (I don't want to marry a man), Social Security cuts (I figure that saving for my retirement will make me ineligible due to innevitbale means testing), and cuts in school funding and student aid (ours have undergrad degrees).
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drew_eckhardt says
Anyone can cherry pick data, and while I don't entirely disagree, we have always found plenty of ways to kill ourselves. The simple fact is that in America, every man woman and child has a 10X greater chance of being shot to death than in countries like Japan or Chile. We could significantly reduce the number of deaths by making guns harder for psychotics to get.
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gbenson says
No, the thugs and psychotics will ALWAYS find ways to obtain guns. Give me a fighting chance by allowing me the ability to defend myself. I'll take my chances of man-on-man, gun against a gun any day. By the same token, every time a thug gets a drop on me with a gun and I don't have one ... my chances of a good outcome decrease by magnitudes.
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drew_eckhardt says
Two points:
1. We DO have swimming classes for kids.
2. I agree that mass school shootings are relatively rare (although still FAR more frequent than most other countries). And that's one of the reasons why the security guard idea is stupid. Mass murders are just a small part of the total amount of gun violence in the U.S., and the total amount is unacceptable. The problem cannot be solved by adding MORE guns; we can't just have security guards everywhere we go. That's absurd on its face. We need to control the guns.
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mmmarvel says
I disagree. Adam Lanza was taught to love guns by his mother, and she was the one who owned the advanced weaponry. It's the pitifully easy availability of these weapons that is leading to incidents like this. If guns were illegal, or heavily regulated, and Adam had not been inducted into the gun culture at an early age, would he have made the necessary contacts to purchase an illegal gun? Would he even have known how to do this? Or would he have acted out in some other, less tragic way, or done nothing at all?
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mmmarvel says
I've never had a gun pulled on me in my life. If that's happening to you a lot, perhaps you should reconsider your lifestyle.
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121212 says
Yep. Case in point:
CaptainShuddup says
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From outside the US it is hilarious when Americans talk about left and right. From the point of view of the rest of the world, the US has two parties, right wing and extreme right wing. Obama is supposedly left wing within the US, but he has adopted policies more extreme than Bush whilst protecting Bush and his cronies from prosecution.
Republican and Democrat are just brand names, like soap powders. They are made in the same factory to more or less the same formula.
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Lam says
Sad, but true.
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gbenson says
Nope. Gun laws have no correlation with murder rates. You can have no guns and low murder rates, no legal guns and the worst murder rates in the world, or somewhere between on both counts.
Most murderers and their victims are people who live in places with economic disparity and have well below median income. They get guns to kill each other regardless of what laws are passed as they did in Jamaica which banned handguns in 1974, rounded up holdouts with warrantless searches, made special gun courts, tried people in camera (behind closed doors), and imposed mandatory life sentences. Their murder rate skyrocketed to 60 per 100,000 ith 75% of the murders committed with guns.
If you live someplace with low economic disparity (everybody is relatively well off or poor) or are on the upside of the divide you don't have anything to worry about from guns.
When the governments pass gun controls inspite of that, you have more to fear because criminals become less afraid of their victims being armed and crimes against people increase. Australians are twice as likely to suffer assault than Americans and twice as likely to be raped.
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http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/22/politics/gun-debate/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
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Call it Crazy says
What are you trying to show with that chart? Looks to me like there was a steep decline in homicides that exactly corresponds with the start of the assault weapons ban in 1994. Thanks for posting that - LOL.
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Call it Crazy says
Gun ownership is down historically. Wrong again, Crazy.
The graphs of gun ownership vs. murder rate look pretty similar, don't they?
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Shooting you guys down is fun, but I do my shooting figuratively.
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Call it Crazy says
My source:
The General Social Survey (GSS) is one of NORC’s flagship surveys and our longest running project. The GSS started in 1972 and completed its 28th round in 2010. For the last third of a century the GSS has been monitoring social change and the growing complexity of American society. The GSS is the largest project funded by the Sociology Program of the National Science Foundation. Except for the U.S. Census, the GSS is the most frequently analyzed source of information in the social sciences.
Your source:
The National Shooting Sports Foundation is the trade association for the firearms industry. Its mission is to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports. Formed in 1961, NSSF has a membership of more than 7,000 manufacturers, distributors, firearms retailers, shooting ranges, sportsmen's organizations and publishers.
Enough said...
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Homeboy says
Right, we can't rely on FBI data...