School Violence

FullerH: You mean the stern words from a teacher solution?

You're right. I'm imagining if someone came to that school a month ago:

Feds: "Your school qualifies for a new program that would provides metal detectors, weapons, and weapons training for your teachers. We'll pay for it all."
School: "um. (pause. Befuddled expression.) Thou art nuts."

And I think it'd go about the same today.
 
In the case of the Amish, it would go, "No thank you, English. We do not believe in using violence." Remember the climactic scene in Witness?
 
If the Amish accept State and Federal funds for schooling than it is a mute point what they want or what 'passiveness' they espouse.
Unless of course they bow out of all funds.



munk
 
Zero tolerance for weapons so offensive as a swiss army knife or aspirin. I don't know what the answer is, but disarming the student populace and everybody but the police(anybody remember not having a permanantly assigned deputy or cop to their school?) seems to not be the answer. The local LEO's usually get their in time to police up all the bodies and zip them into plastic bags.
 
I don,t know what happened to him that he could do such a thing . I don,t want to know . It is unfathomable to me .

Arming teachers might not be the answer . It would do until someone came up with a better idea . How many more will it take ?
 
Arming teachers, as teachers, is no answer, any more than requiring every citizen to go armed is an answer. But honoring the Second Amendment by not inhibiting responsible citizens from choosing to go armed when they feel capable and willing to do so, that would put an unknown but not negligible number of weapons throughout the society.

By introducing this hardening of all targets, we would discourage a certain type of armed violence, the calculated, deliberate violence of the criminal.

You cannot discourage a suicidally deranged sociopath by threatening to kill him. But by encouraging a significant number of armed citizens in the population at large, you might see the deranged bumping up against some of them before carrying out their planned depredations.
 
munk said:
If the Amish accept State and Federal funds for schooling than it is a mute point what they want or what 'passiveness' they espouse.
Unless of course they bow out of all funds.

munk
Click to expand...
Munk, as a member of a "peace church" myself, I can tell you that the federal and the state governments can not force the Amish to violate one of their principal religious tenets. Now, I may not buy completely into the Quaker Peace Testimony, but I would fight strenuously for the right of any Quaker group to honor that Peace Testimony just as I would fight strenuously for the rights of any other religious group to resist governmental efforts to force them into some mold that does not fit them.
 
I really don't see how you're going to stop crazy people from doing crazy things. I think a panic room style of lock down is safer. However, this will only work if you have people at the front and rear offices watching at all times. For whatever reason, we had a pretty tight security at our schools. No metal detector, but the doors were watched from 7am until 8:30. At 8:30 they were locked. If you were late to school that day without calling ahead, you were not coming to school. If the doors were breeched, an anouncement came over the intercom. The teachers locked the doors from the inside with a key. Being that most of the rooms were completely in the center of the building constructed out of concrete blocks and without any other exit besides the heavy wooden door with a reinforced slim glass window, the students were pretty safe. The key was making sure that the alarm was sound before the nut job could get to the rooms. We had drills on this, and actually had a run in with an armed person storming the school.
He was a year or so older than I was, but was not really a teacher favorite. Kind of a trouble maker, but really, a pretty good guy. However, he was always a bit...off. Finally, he had screwed up so many times that he was kicked out of the school for good. He supposedly grabbed his gun and made his way into the school to take out the principal (not the students. I honestly believe that he wouldn't have hurt anyone). Due to the lock down, he could not make his way to his target and was caught by the police. The gun was a bluff, but you can never be too sure.
I liked this guy, but i was glad to have the lock down in order. The guy ended up running drugs in our little town. Some of our local "finest" found him dead several months ago. He had commented suicide...two shots in the gut and one in the head:rolleyes: He got what was coming to him, but there is no doubt in my mind that he was shot in a deal gone bad. He was a big guy, and two shots to the guts probably wouldn't have dropped him. It was just easier to label it something and be done with an undesirable....sorry about the rant;) He was a pretty good guy, just backwards as hell.

Jake
 
You know, I do agree with the right of people to arm themselves. I think responsible people should be able to defend themselves, and that the Government should have no right to tell them they cannot. Heck, half of the point of the Second Amendment was to protect the citizens from tyrannical government in the first place.

That said, we are missing the overlying problem at hand--the culture of violence in America that breeds this bloodshed. How many homicides do we have per year? 11,000? 12,000? I don't know, but it's somewhere around that. How many does, say, Canada have (who has more guns per capita than we do)? Maybe a couple hundred? That's a pretty big gap.

The issue is not the weapons. It's that people kill each other. And why and how do we solve it? Besides responsible self-defense?

Chris
 
I don't like the concept of a culture of violence, as if it's a specifically American thing. And I believe Canada has its own violence, especially in the more densely populated areas, which is a large part of the problem.

How many homicides do we have when we factor out the inner-city drug dealers shooting each other?
 
We have violence, for sure. Most of the lethal violence that's made the news in the past couple of years is criminal-on-criminal violence related to drug dealing. Mostly using smuggled, illegal handguns. Non-firearm violence is a fact of life among the destitute in urban inner cities, but it tends to be not lethal, and strongly associated with alcohol and drug use.

As to other violence? Your spouse is by far the most likely one to kill you. If you live in the North, in other rural areas, and/or are Aboriginal, your risk goes up - as does the likelihood that there will be a firearm in the house which could be brought into play, bringing with it a higher statistical likelihood that someone will die.

And occasionally, we've got someone like this fruitcake from Montreal who shoots up a school etc. I'm aware of 3 such incidents in 17 years.
 
As a retired fed, the State of Indiana presented me with a lifetime permit to carry concealed, and then enacted a conflicting law that says no one, even a teacher, should carry a gun to school, even in defense of the kids. This means if I do choose to protect my classroom, I could go to jail for it....Go Figure.
 
Statistics might indicate other trends for smaller increments of time, but it appears to me that death by gunshot wound has declined exponentially in at least the northern half of MN in the past 100 years. I have a few family members buried in a small graveyard off a gravel road way out in the North Boondocks, and they are among the very few ensconced there for "natural causes." There are only three VFW tombstones in that place, and most of the rest got there via some type of "Winchester litigation" or other.

Nearby there is another cemetary for children only, farther out in the woods and under bigger trees. Every one of these little people succumbed to illnesses which are now routinely cured by a trip to a Dr's office, but there are no victims of violence there.

So, it appears that in the past people were alot more violent but also alot more protective of kids, even to the point of burying them in a different place so they would be even further sheltered from adult mayhem. That is the way it seems to be in these parts anyway. I would not be aware of this if it were not for my Dad, who knows the story behind all of the tombstones and is approaching the century mark himself.
 
As to other violence? Your spouse is by far the most likely one to kill you. If you live in the North, in other rural areas, and/or are Aboriginal, your risk goes up - as does the likelihood that there will be a firearm in the house which could be brought into play, bringing with it a higher statistical likelihood that someone will die.
>>>>>>>>>> Tom Fetter (excuse me, wrong name attributed intitially.

Define 'rural'. Firearm deaths in rural communities are lower than city families with firearms. But if you looked at the Reservations, which are rural, they are as high or higher.

There may be 'rural' on the outskiirts of a large metropolitan area which also shares the same firearm stats, but here we are 3 hours from a big city and this lifestyle more like the 1950's than now. There are guns in the corners of livingrooms, in trucks, and our homicide numbers by any method are lower than urban areas.

It is of course true that if there are no firearms in the home, there will be no homicide by a spouse with a firearm. You might get poisened, or just shot by the gang banger because you were unarmed.

Accidental firearms deaths continue the trend of being at an all time low.

I might believe that a firearm in the house brings with it a greater statisitical likelihood of homocide anywhere, though certainly not the sometimes quoted 43 times more likely to be killed by a family member than a intruder.

munk
 
Munk? That was this Tom, not Tom Linton.

Here in Canada, rural residents (i.e. participating in a rural economy and not living in towns or cities, rather than city commuters who live on acreages) tend to own firearms at a greater rate than urban residents. For obvious reasons here - Canadian firearms law is oriented towards firearms being hunting tools, and more rural dwellers hunt, or might need to defend livestock from predators.

As to firearms homocides ... again, in Canada they really fall into two major groups. The first (and growing) one is gang-on-gang drug related violence. Mostly in urban areas, and mostly with illegal handguns.

But ordinary Canadians who die by homocide are more likely to be killed by their spouses during domestic disputes than by anyone else. And in turn, most of those homocides involve hunting firearms, that were pressed into service... So these rural residents, who are more likely to own hunting firearms, are the ones with the higher murder rates.

Not to say that spousal assault doesn't happen elsewhere, or that other weapons aren't used (kitchen knives etc.). Just that a kitchen knife is not so reliably lethal as a 12 gauge, so more of those disputes end up with aggravated assault charges instead of murder or manslaughter.

t.
 
I saw my mistake and corrected, Tom.

The further North you go, you said. That means Native populations with increased stats in all areas.

Is it your contention, then, that rurual households have a higher homocide rate than city households? Family on family, violence, I mean.

I doubt very much this is true. In fact, I'll bet there is increased violence in city homes over rural homes, and that a gun in a city home is more likely to be used than a gun in a rural home. You have proposed a statistically flat equation. "Guns in home- more homocide. Since more guns in rural, more homocide by gun." (quotes mine) That is flawed. Crime by gun will not be the same in each area.
I do know when Canada restricted handguns, argued to limit teen suicide, suicide rates still went up. Leaping suicides took the place of handguns. Canada has a lot of cliffs.

munk
 
Lots of cliffs indeed. What was it Hopkins wrote? "Cliffs of fall, no man fathomed." More than enough have fathomed them, I agree.

I see where I've been unclear. The homocide rate is higher in rural (and northern) areas; the actual number of homocides is higher in urban areas ... that's where most of Canada's population lives. I can't recall the percentages, but hypothetically, 2% of 90% of the population is still a bigger number than 4% of 10% of the population.

In both urban and rural stats, the homocide rate is higher if there is a firearm in the household.

Yes, suicide is somewhat different - people still find a way. I was leaving that out of the equation. But what I recall in now 15 year old stats, is that more suicides are "completed" when using a firearm than, for instance, when taking pills, or running into traffic. Sometimes folks with lethal intention vomit up the pills .. or the driver of the truck is miraculously able to swerve or brake. But a shotgun in the mouth usually accomplishes the deed.

Please don't read this as a gun-control plea on my part; just trying to lay out what I remember of the stats.

t.
 
If your homocide rate is higher in rural areas than urban, something is very wrong.
This goes against US stats. The only thing I can think of to explain it would be using the Native populations in the general stats. I think the Navajo, for instance, had the largest homocide rate in the US several years running, but Reservation stats are rarely used for general stats. The media ignores reservation stats. I don't think the Govt pools them into the larger picture either. Canada has few persons north, and a great many of those are ndn, are they not? Many in 'reservations'? (or at least areas of historical occupancy.)
In the US, it is just the opposite, and the numbers are not even close- rural areas have a far less homocide rate than the city. Almost everyone here owns a gun, I might add, and Eastern Montana is very rural.

But if I included Rocky Boy, Wolf Point, Flat Head, or Fort Belknap, you'd think the wild west was never won.
Reservation life is like the projects in East LA. Maybe worse. Yeah, probably much worse.
The amount of crime- molestation, drug addiction, theft, rape, and murder are staggering. When the Navajo had the 'record' it was not only family vs family, but a passerby might be randomly shot just 'because'

Here they used to shoot at the trains running along Route 2. All the railroad people knew it too- go through Harlem, Montana, get shot. I think that particular fad died out.

munk
 
I don't know if reserve populations are included in the stats, though I wouldn't be surprised. I do know that aboriginal populations (on-reserve, off-reserve, Metis) are significantly higher in the North, and in some parts of the Prairie provinces - still the majority in some areas. And I fully expect that including aboriginal populations in the stats does pump up the rural rates. I recall a high school principal in a reservation school just south of Edmonton once estimating that about 90% of his school population had been abused.

Our murder stats are what they are, though. More murders are committed with firearms than with any other means. More firearms are owned per capita in rural rather than in urban areas. Correspondingly, the murder rate is higher in rural areas, reflecting a proportionately higher level of access to more reliably lethal tools. There are numerically more murders in urban areas, because the population is higher ... but on a per/100,000 basis, you're more likely to be killed if you're a rural dweller. And again, most likely by your spouse.

Canadian urban areas don't necessarily have lower rates of violent domestic crime than rural ones ... but the lower rate of ready access to more lethal weapons makes those attacks less likely to end up as a murder. More commonly, aggravated assault.

What we don't have, to the same degree, is an urban criminal element typically toting firearms ... and prompting urban dwellers to purchase firearms for personal protection. For instance, when I worked Child Welfare in Edmonton, most of the teenaged boys on my caseload were up on charges for assault, break-and-enter, car theft etc. Not one of those guys had used or carried a firearm during their crimes ... because concealable firearms were very difficult to find. They carried knives etc., lead pipes, chains ... but grunt-level thugs did not have ready access to handguns ... unlike the higher-up criminals who ran the drug operations.

The upshot was that criminal-on-citizen crime typically wasn't a firearms-laden situation, though criminal-on-criminal (higher-ups hurting grunt-level thugs) might easily be. From what I can make out, that's a different situation from what my US friends describe.

The unarmed characteristic of the criminal population I described from the mid 1990s is unfortunately starting to change in Canada - more illegal handguns are becoming available, and more street-level thugs involved in the drug trade are carrying them. It's not yet bridged over into general carrying by property-crime thugs, but it may yet.
 
Lest I be taken for a no-gun advocate ... I'd readily buy a gun for self-defence if I lived somewhere that I had a likelihood to need it. That is, if my potential assailant was likely to be carrying a firearm. Because the US stats I've seen do show that where handguns are widely enough distributed throughout the population that you can expect a criminal to have one ... you're when owning one than when not.

Where I live, few of my potential assailants likely carry one yet ... not even my spouse!:eek: :D Until that changes, the stats say that for a variety of potential harms, I'm safer not keeping a gun in the house. As I've said elsewhere, my wife's been suicidal on a few occasions over the decades ... the lower the lethality of the methods right at hand that she's got to choose from, the happier I am.
 
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