Idealism vs Realism
I agree, the IDEAL would be NO armed guards in schools. IDEALISM
Don't be misled by newscasts that utilize large amounts of percentages in their reports. Often, the raw numbers are MUCH MORE informing.
If we have 100 people standing in a room of average size in a hotel and 2% of them are crazy that means two (2) of the 100 people are crazy.
We still can say 2% of the people are crazy, but it the population of people is 200, then how many crazy people do we have? Well, the answer is 4. Four (4) people in the same sized room, but the number of people has doubled (from 100 to 200). Still, ONLY 2% are crazy.
Now change the room to a city, and crazy to gun owners. Or change city to nation, and crazy to gun owners.
So you can see that while the PERCENT of gun owners doesn't change and the PERCENT of CRAZY people doesn't change, the actual NUMBER of crazy people and gun owners is 2 times what it was. I suppose that by extrapolation we might say there are twice as many "crazy gun owners" as before.
Armed guards in schools is starting to make more sense. There are other measures, most of which are more expensive short term, but there ARE other measures.
Hardening access is an alternative. Leave access "soft" and kill the armed guard and you still have a tragedy. Cost of the tragedy, MUCH MORE THAN THE COST OF Hardening. So it really is a matter of PAY ME NOW or PAY ME LATER. The pay me later option is almost guaranteed to include some deaths.
Should there be some changes to gun laws? Probably, but my personal preference is to let experts on both sides of the issue hammer that out, with some very specific guidelines as to outcomes and time table, etc.
Is this a reasonable approach?
Would love to hear some other comments and ideas.
