On the program earlier, Illinois Democrat senator Dick Durbin argued that arming school employees would be the wrong way to tackle the matter.
“I honestly think that that argument just doesn’t hold water,” Durbin said, “When you think about it, are we talking about arming teachers, arming principals? Is that going to make us a safer America? I don’t think so. Too many people are harmed by firearms, their own firearms, accidentally misused or turned on them.”
Well, we’ve armed pilots on planes, to good effect in the skies (along with air marshalls, and no one is complaining that they are armed). Sometimes, when I used to fly often, it was easy to pick out the A.M. as they joked and talked too much with the flight crew and if they stood just right, you could see they were carrying. If I could do it, so could the bad guys. Thus, the pilots are the last line of defense against evil.
Durbin has no basis to assert what he does – he doesn’t know that it wouldn’t make schools safer. In the first few moments of a tragedy like CT, people are going to get hurt and, unfortunately, die. But given some short amount of time (as the national average is about 23 minutes for law enforcement to arrive), those willing to be trained and willing to be that ‘go to” person could stop others from being involved in that tragedy.
Look, far be it for me to cause us to revert to a “Fortress School” mentality. The truth is that Sandy Hook did have a security system in place with locked doors. What it didn’t have was staff members or an SRO (school resource officer – a cop for schools) that could respond in like fashion. We’ll never know if the existence of one (or a few trained folks) could have prevented either classroom from being a killing zone) but we have seen that when killers like this deranged 20 year old are confronted with an armed person, they stop (or stop and kill themselves).
I do believe that the Progressive Gun-grabbers have it in their heads that they have the Right to punish 10s or 100s of millions of innocent, law abiding citizens who happen to see guns as a sport (or for other reasons) by saying security trumps your so-called Right simply because a miniscule number of bad actors. I also do believe that the role of society in removing the mentally ill from the general population before they do harm also needs to be reviewed. That is the actual issue and not the hunks of metal and plastic that these ill individual use as tools. As Rick showed, these hunks of metal and plastic are also used to safe people too..
