Friday, February 1, 2013

Atlanta School Shooting

CBS reports
A student opened fire at his middle school Thursday afternoon, wounding a 14-year-old in the neck before an armed officer working at the school was able to get the gun away, police said.


Multiple shots were fired in the courtyard of Price Middle School just south of downtown about 1:50 p.m. and the one boy was hit, Atlanta Police Chief George Turner said. In the aftermath, a teacher received minor cuts, he said.

The wounded boy was taken "alert, conscious and breathing" to Grady Memorial Hospital, said police spokesman Carlos Campos. Grady Heath System Spokeswoman Denise Simpson said the teen had been discharged from the hospital Thursday night. Campos said charges against the shooter were pending.
The gun rights folks are right about one thing, armed guards in schools can be a good thing. The only problem is they offer that as the only solution while gun control folks want to know where a 14-year-old got a gun and what can be done to prevent that in the future.

What do you think?  Please leave a comment.

13 comments:

  1. Shouldn't the title say "Mass shooting stopped by armed guard"?

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    1. No. There is no indication that there was anyone else that the teen wanted to shoot, just because there were multiple shots fired. My reading of other accounts suggested that the student fired only at his one victim, but most of the shots missed.

      The guard was armed but was off duty and appeared not to have drawn his gun. Therefore it was not because this person was employed as security that he intervened; he could have as easily been anyone.

      It wasn't that long ago that a teacher disarmed a student after someone was much more severely injured, and where the student DID have another target planned. The teacher was unarmed.

      That would suggest that there is a better chance without guns being involved to intervene in these incidents, with better outcomes.

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    2. That suggests nothing of the kind. An unarmed person going up against someone armed has a limited chance for success. In these cases, the good people benefit from the fact that these crazies tend to be cowards. But that's a slim reed to grasp.

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  2. MikeB,

    Lunatics are walking around free in our society. That is a fact. If a lunatic decides to harm a good citizen, it is impossible to prevent that lunatic from acting before they act. All we can do is respond to a lunatic's actions and defend ourselves.

    It is equally impossible to eliminate all the tools that a lunatic can use to harm good citizens. The possibilities are quite literally endless. That is why disarming citizens will NOT stop lunatics from attacking and killing people.

    Police officers need firearms to stop lunatics that have started an attack ... and so do good citizens.

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    1. Most mass shooters are not mentally ill. The majority are in fact perfectly sane.

      You can't in good faith blame mental health for the gun violence problem. You have to blame the sane owners of mostly legal guns.

      In point of fact, disarming citizens DOES reduce gun violence rather dramatically, and as a result, reduces violence overall.

      Someone suggested to me earlier today that if a school shooter couldn't get a gun, they would use a bomb. The problem with that claim is that wikipedia has a listing of school bombings, both successful and unsuccessful, and there aren't very many, certainly not compared to shootings, nor do they tend to produce many victims compared to shootings.

      We need to disarm our citizens because the stats show they don't do a good job handling firearms. They shoot each other, not fantasy 'bad guys' most of the time.

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    2. Banning the possession, use and proliferation of firearms and all other objects intended to be used as a weapon by the common civilian (with exceptions for approved persons who can demonstrate a valid need to keep a weapon) would prevent criminals from obtaining weapons. If the possession of a firearm is appropriately punished (up to the use of capital punishment) there would be a strong deterrent against the formation of an illicit arms market.

      The regulation of arms possessed by mere subjects of the State (those subject to the rule of law) is pointless. The common person, with no ties to any law enforcement agency, no employment based armament need, and who conveys no public authority bears no interest in the preservation of domestic tranquility. If the U.S. government continues to allow individual non-State actors to obtain and possess firearms, the United States congress is in gross violation of the peoples right to Civilian Disarmament, as expressed in the preamble of the Constitution of the United States. The common civilian has no reasonable claim of any right to possess weapons, however the ordinary subject has the right to be disarmed. Congress bears the fundamental duty to fulfill this right.

      It would therefore be possible (as well as necessary) to interpret the constitution to Prohibit Firearm Possession by civilians, based on the right to disarmament which can be derived from mandates in the preamble to "promote the general welfare" and to "ensure domestic tranquility" as well as (my) theory that the Second Amendment gives congress and the executive (President, OIRA, Justice Department, who interpret congresses's laws) sole power to regulate the possession and use of arms, which are reserved for use in a congressionally appropriated militia. The constitution therefore reserves the right to "keep and bear arms" is reserved to the militia, which congress may commission, and prohibits any other entity from possessing any object intended to be used as a weapon, as is necessary to "promote the general welfare" and "ensure domestic tranquility", as provided in the preamble. Under this interpretation, any weapon which lies within U.S. territory, is Federal property, and unconstitutional for anyone to possess, unless acting as part of a Congressionally authorized militia, congress maintains all authority to regulate or delegate authority regulating the militia, and congress has the moral, practical and legal obligation to enforce this constitutional "right to civilian disarmament" with appropriate legislation.

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    3. Finally, Dog Gone admits what we've suspected all along: She's for civilian disarmament.

      But seriously, do you really believe that most mass shooters are sane? It's statements like that that make regarding you as intelligent such a challenge.

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    4. What we can do is make it much more difficult for the lunatics to get guns.

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    5. You can try to make it more difficult for a handful of lunatics to get guns, while certainly making it more difficult for millions of law-abiding and sane Americans to get them.

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  3. And this is yet another example that declaring a school a "gun free zone" does not affect attackers. It didn't stop the attacker and the school wasn't free of guns.

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    1. WAS this a gun free zone? Not all of them are.

      The reality is that there are fewer instances of shootings in gun free zones than in guns permitted zones.

      This particular school DOES have metal detectors at the entrances, and the school is investigating how this shooter got his gun past them. There are clearly important parts of the story not yet discovered.

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    2. The question ought not to be "did the shooting occur in a Legislated Gun Free Zone or not", but rather would such shooting occur if the United States was a Gun Free Zone?

      I blame the government, for its wanton recklessness and irresponsibility, in allowing an armed society.

      The government ALLOWED this man to be armed. If the State would properly perform it's duty to create and maintain a monopoly on the ability to wield deadly force (achieved by the collection of civilian-possessed weapons, and prohibitive firearm and non-explosive weapon laws)

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    3. Dog Gone, schools that allow the good guys to carry a gun are so rare as to make it just about guaranteed that any school you care to name will be officially a gun-free zone. We see how well that worked out.

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