Suggest ways to protect school age children.

[HughScot]

If someone doesn't come up with a real solution to protecting children while at school people will pass legislation that we won't like.

[croberts]

Put up a twelve foot wall around the school grounds with metal detectors and full body scanners.

Shut down all the schools and force everyone to home school their kids.

Your basically asking, how can we rid the world of evil? I don't think there is a good solution without any big tradeoffs.

[peterg7]

Home school


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[croberts]

On second thought, here is an unintuitive idea:

What if firearm safety and basic competency were taught in public schools? Obviously, this would never get through our political system, but I wonder if treating kids like competent beings instead of liabilities would help give them more self-worth, in addition to more respect for firearms.

[Aguila Blanca]

https://thefiringline.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=593557

[ATN082268]

Originally Posted by HughScot

If someone doesn't come up with a real solution to protecting children while at school people will pass legislation that we won't like.

First, I think everyone has to realize and admit that no matter what you do, there will always be shootings of some kind. Second, unless you can reasonably show that policy "x" will produce "y" result, then it is better not to do it. If mass shootings, for example, are still a significant problem despite numerous gun control laws, then more gun control laws aren't likely to yield positive results.

[Lohman446]

As ATN points out: we cannot engage the "not one more child" argument. Its a fallacious and impossible goal and if it is a realistic and valid goal it likely allows for the removal of all sports in high school. I have not looked but I bet I can find a death related to various sports in the last year. The same "goal" makes virtually everything forbidden.

[TruthTellers]

Protect them in school? Simple, armed presence. It's what keeps crazies from attacking the White House, Governor's Mansions, Capitol Hill, state legislatures... they all have a "royal guard" with guns.

Do the same with schools. They don't need a guard their 24 hours a day, and the goal isn't that you get a Navy Seal guarding kids, it's just the mental intimidation that if you, as a shooter or a person wanting to harm kids, is going to have to also contend with a guy(s) you know will be there shooting at you, you're dissuaded from doing anything stupid.

Even better is put a security cabinet in the classroom, make it so only faculty can access the cabinet, and inside put a .223 rifle with a 30 rd magazine and train the teachers.

[Lohman446]

I think TruthTeller has a point though I disagree with arming teachers as a prerequisite. I believe some teachers can and should be armed but many should not be.

Just raise the bar. Our school children should be at least as protected as our politicians.

[Pahoo]

I believe some teachers can and should be armed but many should not be.

Pretty much agree and don't forget the janitors and other service folks who are capable and willing. However, not be forced. Then supplement with extras, either paid or volunteered. I personally know of teachers who are now carrying. You are up against school boards and administrators who would not even let Eddie-Eagle in. A local program can be started and there are models that would help. .....

Be Safe !!!

[DaleA]

It's been suggested we put police substations in schools.

We got police substations in the neighborhoods anyway, I guess I don't see much problem with moving them into the schools.

Money of course is a problem but I'd think it's money well spent.

Also the kids would get to see the police as their protectors, which they are, and I have no patience with folk that say police should NOT be in schools.

If any teachers/administrators/school workers want to take some training and are willing to carry that would be fine with me too.

[FITASC]

Home school, parochial school, home-based internet schooling', reducing the size of school populations, especially high-school. Bring back our National Guard troop on overseas deployments and use them in schools

[seanc]

2,000 teens die each year from drunk driving.

Per the CDC, roughly 10% of teens drive drunk (which I think is optimistic at best!).
https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/teend...ing/index.html

Are 10% of teens taking a gun to school? Are there 2,000 deaths a year from these school shootings? Can the Democrats shift the blame for drunk driving onto Republicans?

That boy checked every red flag, right up until the day he finally shot up his school. Will more laws have stopped him if the local police and FBI won't act?

[Lohman446]

pretty much agree and don't forget the janitors and other service folks who are capable and willing

That is true as well about others in the building. I hear stories from down in Florida about a coach and teacher who were running towards the gun fire and pushing students out of the way and both ended up falling as heroes. I wonder how different things could have been if these two individuals, part of the schools practiced response, had been armed.

I look back to my high school days in the 90's. Some of my teachers and the "service" personal in the school would have been laughable with guns and should not have ever had them. Some were veterans, farmers, and hunters who you just knew better then to cross. To tell these people that they are better off not armed always seemed a little strange to me.

[Chainsaw.]

How about instead of having these circular discussions about a superfluous part of these issues, we discuss why these people are doing this. Namely, the prescription drugs we are pumping our children full of. Drug which side effects are clearly stated, some being SUICIDAL AND HOMICIDAL thoughts and feelings. But we've become so acustom to having a pill as a solution we glaze over that part of the commercial. And here we having the same old discussion after the same old events.

[Danoobie]

Obviously society's behind the learning curve, here. We protect everything else by
restricting access to it, and guarding it with guns. But we gather all our children
into one unprotected area, EVERY DAY, post a sign, and make an asinine assumption.

[Aguila Blanca]

Originally Posted by Lohman446

Just raise the bar. Our school children should be at least as protected as our politicians.

That -- or our politicians should be as UNprotected as our kids. Remove access restrictions at government buildings (especially in Washington) and see how fast politicians get serious about addressing the underlying problems that [sometimes] result in mass shootings.

[zukiphile]

Originally Posted by Danoobie

Obviously society's behind the learning curve, here. We protect everything else by
restricting access to it, and guarding it with guns. But we gather all our children
into one unprotected area, EVERY DAY, post a sign, and make an asinine assumption.

Indeed.

The bank has a guard. Nice guy. The arcade gets a guard. The mall gets several. Some groceries have an armed guard. City hall has several. Every courthouse has a guard to protect them from me wearing a belt or watch. The federal courthouse has the metal detector turned up so the nails in the heels of my shoes set it off.

[Lohman446]

Obviously society's behind the learning curve, here. We protect everything else by
restricting access to it, and guarding it with guns. But we gather all our children
into one unprotected area, EVERY DAY, post a sign, and make an asinine assumption.

This is a good point.

With 3,000 people in a school and something like 16 officers per 10,000 individuals per capita (http://www.governing.com/gov-data/sa...partments.html) shouldn't there have been about 4 or 5 dedicated officers to that school in Florida?

[SIGSHR]

How about teaching the kids to fight back ? Set up teams, teach them to function, fight as a team, give some basic martial arts instruction, teach them that the mind is THE weapon. Pick up a chair, a waste paper basket, a book, a computer, throw it at an assailant. The best defense is a good offense.

[SonOfScubaDiver]

The schools need to be hardened up. For example, this latest shooter manage to get all these kids out in the hallways by pulling the fire alarm. Why, in this day and of electronic everything, are schools still relying on such an outdated way of detecting fires? A sensor based system that included video surveillance and fire proof doors to isolate the area where a fire was detected would make much more sense. Also, doors leading into classrooms need to be hardened and made to automatically close and lock at the push of a button. Any outside facing windows need to be upgraded to bulletproof glass. Playgrounds need to have fences or walls around them with video surveillance. Yes, it would cost a lot of money. No, I don't think it would prevent all school shootings from occurring. But I do think it would go a long way in making it much more difficult for anyone to walk into a school and go on a killing spree.

[TDL]

US gun murder rate is down between 55% to 60% the past generation (since early 1990) depending on whether you look at CDC or FBI. Looking at the age cohorts it looks like school age youth cohort 5-20 is a larger drop than other cohorts. There are "notable" media covered events but these are statically trivial outliers, and there is nothing to indicate that massive decrease in school age children murdered is less in school/school grounds/zones than the overall decrease in that cohort.

So I think a starting point is that despite people saying 'the old days were safer," and in fact that error is a misconception of the majority of Americans, an inversion of the core metric, is to recognize that our kids have never been safer from lethal violence than they are today.

The fact is in the rest of the world, the ability to bring someone in for mental health violations is easier, people can be held longer to be tested, the thresholds for committing them are less. The ACLU (for good and for bad) has systematically made it more difficult with scores of major court fights the past 40 years. Just as our First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth amendments rights are in practice subtly or markedly stronger than most developed democracies.

I have kids in school, but I also understand that the long term trends are they are much safer than when I was in school, and all our constitutional rights can be shown to make us less "safe."

FYI if we outside of the main trend, and cherry pick data with defintion of murder situation's, one can show anything. One can show Australia has had larger mass murder of children after mass gun confiscation than before, one can show Europe has had much bigger ones than the US (Utoya, Beslin). It is best to go with the overall rate of murder of school age cohort -- which in the USA is way WAY down.

[Aguila Blanca]

Originally Posted by SonOfScubaDiver

The schools need to be hardened up. For example, this latest shooter manage to get all these kids out in the hallways by pulling the fire alarm. Why, in this day and of electronic everything, are schools still relying on such an outdated way of detecting fires?

Fire alarms aren't for detecting fires, they are for activating alarms. Manual pull station alarms may be a requirement in Florida's building and/or fire codes. My state requires them for certain occupancies -- I'd have to research whether or not that includes schools.

Also, doors leading into classrooms need to be hardened and made to automatically close and lock at the push of a button.

Conflicting criteria. I've worked on schools, including specifying the door hardware. Your front door lock probably uses a key from the outside, and a button that you push in and turn (a "thumbturn") from the inside. This type of lock is cleverly called an "Entrance function" lockset. No good in schools, because that would allow the kids to lock the teacher out of his/her own classroom if the teacher happened to step out into the hall.

Going back many years, there was (and still is) a lock function called "Classroom." A "Classroom" function lock has nothing on the inside knob (or lever, today), and a key tumbler on the outside. The door is always able to be opened from the inside, even when locked (fire codes again). It can only be locked or unlocked from the outside, using a key.

And that's where things stood for decades ... until Columbine. Suddenly people awoke to the security issues of a shooter in the school. The traditional classroom lock required the teacher to step out in the corridor in order to lock the door if a lockdown was called for. So the lock manufacturers came up with a new design, called a "Classroom Security Function" lockset. Same as the old classroom locks, except for the addition of a key tumbler on the inside. With this new Classroom Security Function lock, the teacher can lock the door without needing to enter the corridor and expose him/herself to gunfire.

Following on that, for the schools that can afford it, the lock makers have come up with integrated, electronic, remote control systems whereby all classroom doors can be locked by a signal from the central office. Nice systems, but VERY pricey, and prohibitively expensive to be considered for retrofit in existing schools due to the cost of running the wiring on top of the cost of the hardware itself.

Schools built today are probably a mix between the Classroom Security Function manual locks, and the remote electronic systems. But there are a LOT of existing schools that I'll bet still have the older Classroom Function locks on the classroom doors.

[SonOfScubaDiver]

Aguila, I wasn't talking about pushing a button on the handle to lock the door. I was talking about a button that would be pushed from the office that would tell all the doors to close and lock. Something like a magnetic system that would hold the doors open and then release them to close and lock them once that button was pushed.

As for local codes--I'm sure something passed on a federal level would take precedence over any local or state codes.

And who cares what it costs? We manage to pull hundreds of billions of dollars out of the nation's collective backside to pay for unnecessary wars. It's time we redirect some of that money.

[FITASC]

This still does nothing to address the CAUSES; putting bandaids on severed arteries does nothing to stop the bleeding. This was a 100% preventable event. Even the FBI totally dropped the ball on this (was it deliberate or accidental I'll leave to conspiracy theorists). This is an issue with many factors, from mental health to a breakdown of traditional family scenarios to massive drug (legal and illegal), exposure to constant violence and on and on. Couple all of that with an instant world-wide media access and these get overblown instantaneously. Kids were more interested in texting friends and taking videos than getting themselves or their friends to safety......