Re: NRA Newtown response
As I have noted before, there was a Resource officer at Columbine High School who exchanged fire with the shooters and it did no good.
On the contrary, that officer (a sherrifs' deputy) got into a gunfight that delayed the shooters for some time, allowing many students to escape, and then he organized the evacuation before SWAT came on-scene, allowing many
more to escape. Students survived that day because Columbine had an armed first-responder on-scene.
You seem to have the interesting notion that because he didn't Rambo-Style kill two shooters who were using home-made explosives with his pistol that he was ineffective. Apparently you do not consider saving childrens' lives to be a metric of
success? Only dead bodies count as your metric?
He was not able to stop them. A Resource Officer typically carries a small side arm, whereas school shooters typically use assault weapons. Resource Officers are usually outgunned.
You will get no argument from me that armed first responders in a school should have biometric access to semi-automatic carbines, and that there should desireably be
two so that they can operate as a buddy-team; or split up to have one handle the shooter while the other covers an evacuation of students.
Furthermore, a drawn out gun battle in the halls of a school is likely to cause additional deaths due to crossfire.
Actually it will cause
fewer deaths because the shooter will be aiming at a trained
responder rather than masses of
children. It's not as if the shooter was going to be meditating in the middle of the hallway absent an armed responder - he's going to be firing into as many people as are available as rapidly as he can.
That is why police typically respond to these kinds of situations with a SWAT team that uses precision to bring down the suspects quickly and efficiently.
...except that woops SWAT takes a while to show up and don't typically have intimate knowledge of the schools the way that shooters often do. If you want to argue that we should camp a
SWAT team at each school....
....Wait a minute. SWAT isn't taking these guys out with hugs. I thought you people were
against armed first responders? Which is it? Should we have armed responders taking these guys out? Or not? Is your argument
really just that we should instead give active shooters a "head start" of however long it takes SWAT (assuming that there even
is one) there and organized?