I want teachers to teach as well but I also want my son to be protected. Why shouldn't a teacher have the right to protect their students? What makes then any different from us? I went to school to be a teacher and have a handgun license. Am I all of the sudden not qualified to protect myself and others?? Just because they are teachers don't mean that they aren't capable of protecting children. Would you rather have a gun free zone than for teachers to carry? I sure as H wouldn't.
While my questions were pointed, I fail to see how they might have been uncivil. Perhaps your end statement was simply a reminder to keep emotion out of the debate. If that's the case, I agree.
TSA security is paid for through Passenger Security Fees of a flat $5 per initial enplanement. In that case, all school security fees would be paid by parents on a per child basis. I doubt that would sit very well at the local PTA meetings.
There are plenty of examples where armed citizens have stopped potential mass killings. Sadly, the news media minimizes these stories and maximizes the ones where an armed person on scene was not available. No one can prove a negative. You can't prove how many hijackings have been prevented by TSA security measures, all you can prove is that there have been no successful attacks in the U.S. since 9-11. Correlation does not imply causation and all that.
As for training and capability, I for one feel that a SDA permit isn't enough training, but a full CLEET law enforcement course is too much. The reason for my opinion is not based on an inability to stop a threat, but because we only have once chance to get this right. Any failure point would cause the entire initiative to collapse. A completely untrained individual could probably pick up a loaded revolver and stop an attacker at 3-5 feet. I could probably stop an attacker at a significantly greater distance. If I remember my Ayoob Files correctly, there was an officer that stopped an attack on a citizen with his issued sidearm at over 70 yards. Just last year, a Texas resident saved the life of an officer who was pinned down by an assailant with an AR in a trailer park. He used a .357 Magnum revolver to shoot the suspect at a range of about 50 yards. There's no indication that the citizen had any special training.
It all comes down to the scenario. In a school setting, the range would probably be close and an armed faculty member would likely be able to get a clear line of fire. Statistically, active shooters self-terminate upon contact with any armed responder. This is a matter of live saved in seconds, not minutes.
Most people don't understand effective security for armed response in a public setting. El-Al does. In 2002, an armed attacker hit the El-Al ticket counter at LAX, killing two and wounding three before he was killed by an armed, UNDERCOVER security agent. Effective security layering for armed response should include armed undercover agents that are only known to administration, security and law enforcement. As a matter of policy, you never reveal how many armed undercover agents you have in place. It’s best to let the public’s imagination run wild on the topic. This provides a threat deterrent that far outweighs all other measures, because you’ll never know in advance who is the armed responder. This is a classic application of OPSEC. Is it two? Twenty? Who knows? The attacker certainly won’t, which will cause most to avoid attacking a facility that’s known to be protected in that fashion.
As a security professional for over 25 years, I have a little bit of expertise on the subject. I teach Active Shooter Prevention, Mitigation and Response to the public. As a matter of fact, I just did a presentation to a local governmental consortium with over 50 employees last week. An effective and robust plan will incorporate a great deal more countermeasures than just armed employees and/or security. I have a well-documented historical reference on active shooter response since the Charles Whitman massacre in 1966. We’ve evolved our strategies a dozen times over in the intervening years, yet we still have school massacres to this day. The Israelis are experts on the subject and for good reason. They passed the threshold where ineffective measures were acceptable long ago. Sadly, many dozens of dead kids and young adults across the country over the past 45+ years has not put the United States over that threshold. The question is, how many will it take?
