Archer Fisks So I Don’t Have to!

Archer knocks one out of the park!

I had my sights on this one, but unfortunately the baby is cutting new teeth, we’re going to Maine for a family function this weekend, and I think the little disease vector has gotten me sick, so it was on the back burner. Go read his fisk, it covers all the points I wanted to get across.

There was one issue he touched upon I wanted to expand upon. Jason does a little link dump of incidents with guns in schools by trained officials as a way to say that changing schools from “gun free zones” to places where people can be as armed as they would be if they weren’t at school is a bad idea.

Let’s look at the stories. The first one is the most severe

According to KLTV, multiple sources identified the employee as Glenn Geddie, a maintenance worker for the district.

“At the conclusion of the CHL training on February 27, 2013, one certified person stayed for private instruction with the instructor and had a mechanical malfunction with his weapon,” Van Independent School District said in a statement. “With the assistance of the instructor, the malfunction was addressed, but the gun misfired and the bullet ricocheted coming back to strike the VISD employee in the left leg.”

No idea what the malfunction was, but there is enough information that suggests it was an actual ACCIDENTAL discharge. That is a malfunction of the gun that lead to the discharge not any negligence. This does rarely happen. In this case the maintenance worker was at a GUN RANGE (not a school) getting training, and the gun discharged and a bullet fragment hit the instructor in the leg.

Now this sucks, but it isn’t the end of the world. You shoot at hard stuff long enough and eventually you’ll catch a little lead. It isn’t fun, and it should be avoided, but I know several people who have been hit with ricochet fragments. None needed anything but a band-aid. To transpose this event to schools seems a bit silly.

Next we have two stories of officer guns in the bathroom.

The Chatfield School, a charter school that teaches K-8 students, hired a retired police weapons instructor to provide armed protection after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. The result wasn’t exactly what they intended:

The security officer “made a breach in security protocol” and left an unloaded weapon in a restroom “for a few moments,” said Chatfield School Director Matt Young.

Young said the school has been in contact with local authorities about the matter and wouldn’t discuss any possible repercussion for the officer, calling it “a personnel matter.” Young also declined to name the security officer.

He links the story TWICE to make it appear like it is two separate events. Then there’s this one:

Police Officer Sean McCutcheon for the town of Lloyd, N.Y., accidentally fired his gun at 1:38 p.m. Tuesday in Highland High School’s hallway, the district said. No one was injured, and no students or staff were nearby when the gun went off.

John Nelson, whose daughter is a sophomore at the high school about 65 miles north of New York City, asked Haab on Tuesday night what a loaded gun was doing at school.

“I’m just shocked,” Nelson said before the meeting. “I don’t understand how a gun could just go off.”

It probably didn’t, the officer likely was handling his gun inappropriately and NEGLIGENTLY discharged it.

Now these events aren’t rare, and aren’t isolated in schools. Cops, sadly, leave guns lying around all the time, I’m sure there are lots of cases where the incident doesn’t even get reported.

When it DOES get reported the officer gets reprimanded and goes BACK TO WORK! Get that? There really isn’t much as far as consequences for this act. Get caught speeding, you get a ticket, and move on. Park in a handicapped spot, you get a ticket and move on. Forget you had a pocket knife on your keychain when you go on a flight, you lose the knife and board the plane.

It really isn’t a big deal. Or is it?

Now meanwhile if this maintenance worker had put a round in the floor while he was at school he’d LOSE HIS JOB! When looking for new jobs he’d need to explain why he’s out of work. Employers will google his name, and call his former employers and they will likely hear the story about the man who way playing with a loaded gun on the job.

Now in all of these cases nobody was seriously hurt, and no school kids were hurt, and in the case of officers acting negligently, it wasn’t the best career move, but it was hardly career ending. Turn that to school staff carrying guns for protection, it becomes different. I know lots of people who carry guns in public, I don’t know anybody who has touched off a round negligently in public. I know this isn’t just people being silent, because we’d read about it in the news.

Seems when there is more at stake than just getting a nasty letter from the chief you get a lot safer gun handling.

More reason to end the foolish behavior of making schools “Gun Free”.

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6 Responses to Archer Fisks So I Don’t Have to!

  1. Jack/OH says:

    Great job, Archer. I pay NEA dues, and here’s what the NEA does seem to be okay with in our schools: massive video and audio surveillance, metal detectors, prison-style blockhouse building construction, dubious “zero-tolerance” policies of various sorts, speech codes, bar-coded IDs, key card entry, text alert programs that magnify pranks into serious threats, school police hired by crony and patronage, etc.

  2. Eck! says:

    Archer does good.

    The funniest part of the fisk and all have missed this is the Video references
    starts for the first minute talking about the though exercise to come. Its very
    clear this is not a proposal only a comparison and could even be talked as
    serious satire on the anti-gun rights next good idea.

    With that said.. the idiot BO goes to NEA oblivious to the fact that he can’t read
    or listen and dares to avoid critical thinking which suggests hes an example of
    how the education system has failed to do anything useful. One must admit
    its easy to wind up that tool.

    So with zero critical thinking and no attention to facts and a disregard for truth
    the anti-gun club are charter members of the we are stupid to the max and propose
    even most stupid and ineffective laws.

    Eck!

  3. Jack/OH says:

    Regarding optional school carry, the NEA may have very legitimate concerns with how optional school carry will present itself in collective bargaining. Obstructionist rhetoric to block any new idea is pretty much standard issue union talk. A key to success is to be sure of your ground, and cross every “t”, dot every “i”. (For example, teachers are likely to be genuinely concerned about whether carrying will tend to bias their evaluations.)

    Student marksmanship training seems to me to be a clear winner. Civics, Americanism, motor skills, Constitutional and statute law, competitiveness, etc. The list of good things connected with student marksmanship training just seems to me overwhelming. You’ll still run into the buzz-saw, drama-mama obstructionism, but if the issue is handled pretty well, pro-gunners will win. Who wouldn’t want to hear the local high school marksmanship team winning a state trophy?

    • Archer says:

      I’d be OK if “marksmanship” weren’t a requirement, per se. It’d be fantastic if every citizen could be taught to shoot well, but that’s not the issue.

      At the very minimum, require safe gun-handling skills and bare-bones proficiency. Not being able to hit in the black is acceptable for people with no love of guns, but being incapable of unloading and clearing a firearm and ignorant of safe handling rules is not.

      • Jack/OH says:

        Any proposal would have to be well thought-out. There are probably genuine reasons to defer or reject school-sponsored marksmanship training, such as budget constraints, or, where gun ownership and use is strong, redundancy. If you’re making the proposal, you’d need to do the homework to separate genuine, well-founded objections from the usual bureaucratic nay-saying.

        There’s at least one instance where gun ignorance (and likely other factors), contributed to a horrific crime. The perpetrator of a sexual assault (and multiple other crimes during the incident) set his weapon within reach of one victim. When the victim was asked later by the authorities why she didn’t grab the gun and use it, she said she didn’t know how to use a gun.
        (Ref: Wichita massacre committed by the Carr brothers.) The “if-it-saves-one-life” line fits in okay, I think, with expanded gun education.

  4. Archer says:

    Thanks, Weer’d!

    It’s kinda funny that Baldr is freaking out over this, given that here in Oregon, CHL holders are exempted from the prohibition on carry in public schools. (Private schools are still private property, so it’s up to the school administrators.)

    Yep. Parents who have permits can carry on school grounds, into school buildings and facilities, to school events, etc. Legally, teachers can, too, but most districts make it a condition of employment that they don’t. The maintenance worker you mention would stay out of jail, but he’d get fired immediately – the union wouldn’t stick up for him, and he’d have a real hard time finding another job.

    It sucks for the sensible-minded school employees, but until the legislature steps in (yeah, right!), or the teachers’ union decides to take it up as a collective bargaining issue (double-yeah, right!), it’s not going to change any time soon.

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