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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (212026)	12/18/2012 10:06:48 AM
From: T L Comiskey	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541118

This undated file photo shows the class of Dunblane Primary School, Scotland, and their teacher, Gwen Mayor. On March 13, 1996, 16 children and Mayor were killed when gunman Thomas Hamilton entered the school and opened fire with four handguns before finally killing himself. (AP)

To: epicure who wrote (212026)	12/18/2012 11:28:52 AM
From: cnyndwllr	2 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541118

Epicure, re: "If guns made a country safe, we should be the safest country on Earth. Now, because we have too many guns, your answer to the problem is more guns. There's an irony there. " If the country is saturated with guns, and it is, then more guns isn't the problem. They're already easily available to the sane and the insane alike so putting a few more on the market isn't going to exacerbate the problem. "And don't get me started on what would happen the first time a teacher or administrator went nuts and shot up the school (or a student got the school gun)- and don't tell me that won't happen." First, a teacher or administrator who might go nuts already has access to weapons off school grounds and can bring them in. Unless there's some way of deterring the transport of weapons onto school grounds the act of placing one on the campus in a secure location would seem to offer little additional risk. Second, you would have to weigh the risk of that against the utility of having a weapon on hand in the event the use of that weapon was your last, best, chance of stopping an ongoing slaughter. That cost/benefit analysis would depend on many factors including such things as whether or not we could find effective ways to store such weapons so that they could be quickly accessed by those who needed access and still be secured against students and others who should never have access, whether there was a person on site who could be trained or already had the skills to use such a weapon and, possibly, some assessment of the risk of attack at the school. There are, I believe, guns coming on the market that may recognize the hand of an authorized shooter, or maybe I"m dreaming that. "If we wanted to live in arm camps, there are certainly places we could move to. I'd rather not live in one, or work in one." But we already do. Our local city cop or country officer on patrol is armed. The CHP officer patrolling the streets and writing tickets is armed. There are armed security guards in many locals. Many homes are armed. An appreciable number of people driving around in their private vehicles and walking the streets are armed. Our national guards have arms stockpiled in the tons. They're everywhere. If we could do it effectively and relatively safely, putting protective arms in the hands of those who would use them to protect our most vulnerable targets from the sick minds that want to create havoc makes some sense to me. I know this is unpopular here and that there will be no progressive support for this in congress or the White House but my point is that we shouldn't simply knee-jerk call the idea ridiculous. Ed