Here are your parasites and terrorists, m*therf*ckers
Mourning the children—and the hero teachers who saved lives—at a makeshift memorial near Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. REUTERS
by VetGrl Sat Dec 15, 2012 at 09:05 AM PST
To the cadre of soulless assholes who delight in condemning teachers and others dedicated to the public education of our nation's youngsters, with apologies for being utterly unable to be polite, I have one message:
They really outdid themselves. In Wisconsin and across the nation, public school employee unions spared no kiddie human shields in their battle against GOP Gov. Scott Walker's budget and pension reforms. Students were the first and last casualties of the ruthless Big Labor war against fiscal discipline.
To kick off the yearlong protest festivities, the Wisconsin Education Association Council led a massive "sickout" of educators and other government school personnel ... When they weren't ditching their students, radical teachers steeped in the social justice ethos of National Education Association-approved community organizer Saul Alinsky were shamelessly using other people's children as their own political junior lobbyists and pawns.
As a massacre unfolded, the teachers of Sandy Hook were the heroes of the hour.
They hid their small charges, remained calm, and quietly led them outside - instructing them to close their eyes so they would be shielded from the carnage.
One of the most damning aspects of this tragedy is that the teachers knew immediately what was unfolding: another school shooting.
Schools nationwide have increased security measures since the shooting at Columbine. Many have installed metal detectors, developed detailed crisis plans, implemented policies to keep doors locked and accessible only by buzzer, and put teachers and staff through training on how to recognize and deal with threats.
Maryrose Kristopik said she barricaded herself in to the closet with the nine and 10-year-olds while gunman Adam Lanza, 20, reportedly battered on the door screaming: ‘Let me in! Let me in!’
...
Asked about the incident itself, Mrs Kristopik said that you could ‘hear a lot’ of what was going on - and denied that she was a hero.
She said: ‘I called the police, I dialled 911 and they said they had reports of shots in the school, so that's when I had to tell the kids there was a bad person there because I didn't want them to talk.
‘I did what any other teacher would have done and I know there were others like me doing the same. They were doing whatever they could."
Janet Vollmer, a kindergarten teacher at the school, says she locked her classroom doors and – to keep her students calm – read them a story until the police came.
Vollmer, her 19 students and the adult helpers in her classroom were not injured.
"You could hear what sounded like pops, gunshots. Of course, I’m not going to tell that to 5-year-olds, so I said to them, ‘We’re going over in a safe area,'" Vollmer told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "And we read a story and we kept them calm, did a lockdown drill, closed the doors, locked (them), covered the windows, and kept the children with us.”
Many Michigan schools are closed today as hundreds of teachers converge on the Capitol in Lansing to protest Michigan right-to-work legislation which was just passed by Republicans and is headed to Governor Snyder's desk.
Another quick-thinking member of staff was Kaitlin Roig whose ''happy'' morning meeting with her 14 students was suddenly interrupted by the unmistakable sound of rapid gunfire.
Ms Roig, 29, said she leapt up, closed her classroom door and then ushered the children, aged six and seven, into the adjacent bathroom. It was so tight some of the pupils had to be balanced on top of the toilet so they could all squeeze in. She then jammed a wheeled storage unit in front of the door and hoped for the best. ''We all got in there. I locked us in,'' she told America's ABC Network. ''I don't know if [the gunman] came in the room … I just told them we have to be absolutely quiet.
''If they started crying, I would take their face and tell them, 'It's going to be OK,''' Ms Roig said. ''I wanted that to be the last thing they heard, not the gunfire in the hall.''
Can we get rid of the myth once and for all that school teachers, anymore, are these average, ordinary (as Obama wants to say), next-door neighbors who are just doing everything they can to further the educational experience of your children?
That's not who they are. They are left-wing activists, active members of unions who are oriented first by a political agenda, second by their own well-being, and your kids come last.
In the library, Yvonne Cech, a librarian, locked herself, an assistant and 18 fourth graders in a closet behind filing cabinets while the sound of gunfire thundered outside.
Diane Day, a school therapist, hailed the school's unnamed ''lead teacher'' as ''our hero'' after she was shot twice while barricading a lockless door with her body to keep Lanza out of a classroom occupied by staff who had been in a meeting before the shooting.
Ms Day told The Wall Street Journal that, after the school principal, Dawn Hochsprung [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/15/dawn-hochsprung-sandy-hook-elementary ], and school psychologist Mary Sherlach had run out of the room to see what was happening, the shooter arrived and tried to force entry. Lanza was thwarted by the teacher who was wounded in the leg and arm as he opened fire through the door.
Ms Hochsprung and Ms Sherlach did not return and were later confirmed dead.
The Stamford Advocate reports the brave principal had, crucially, managed to activate the school's public address system before she was killed. In alerting the rest of her school that a killer was on the rampage, the principal's last courageous act almost certainly prevented further bloodshed.
Fuck the whole lot of you. You don't deserve to breathe the same air as our public servants. Would you risk death to shield a child [ http://www.cnn.com/US/9803/28/funerals.wrap/ ]? No, if the security of your gated world failed you, you'd all be running for the door trying to save your own asses and pushing anyone who got in your way to the ground.
Let me conclude with a passage from an angry rant I posted directed to Rush Limbaugh after comments he made about Elizabeth Edwards' battle against breast cancer. That's a personal issue for me because I lost my own sister to breast cancer. I concluded the post with this with this:
Rush, I'll never get people like you. You don't understand suffering. You don't understand kindness. You don't understand love and support, whether between two people or among a community. You seem to understand nothing but your ego and your own ignorant sense of self importance.
But for as much as I don't get about you or your kind, there's one thing I'm pretty sure of: When you try to check in at the pearly gates, it'll be my sister who's going to kick your fat ass straight to hell.
Ditto, and that goes for the rest of the hate-mongering crowd.
Update: Via DisNoir36 in the comments:
This is Victoria Soto [ http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/523736_4820223498763_1934222138_n.jpg ], and although I didn't know her, she is my hero. I don't know too much about her, but I know a lot of people who do know her and she's amazing. Victoria was a Stratford high graduate and only 27. She was killed today after she hid her first graders in closets and cabinets and told the shooter they were in the gym. He killed her and not one of her children were harmed. I have never been more proud to be from Stratford or to be a teacher. God bless Victoria, her family and friends, and all of those who were involved today in anyway. Victoria is a true hero.
The gunman in the Connecticut shooting blasted his way into the elementary school and then sprayed the children with bullets, first from a distance and then at close range, hitting some of them as many as 11 times, as he fired a semiautomatic rifle loaded with ammunition designed for maximum damage, officials said Saturday.
The state’s chief medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver II, said all of the 20 children and 6 adults gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., had been struck more than once in the fusillade.
He said their wounds were “all over, all over.”
“This is a very devastating set of injuries,” he said at a briefing in Newtown. When he was asked if they had suffered after they were hit, he said, “Not for very long.”
The disclosures came as the police released the victims’ names. They ranged in age from 6 to 56.
The children — 12 girls and 8 boys — were all first-graders. One little girl had just turned 7 on Tuesday. All of the adults were women.
The White House announced that President Obama would visit Newtown on Sunday evening to meet with victims’ families and speak at an interfaith vigil.
On Saturday, as families began to claim the bodies of lost loved ones, some sought privacy. Others spoke out. Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, was among the dead, choked back tears as he described her as “bright, creative and very loving.”
But, he added, “as we move on from what happened here, what happened to so many people, let us not let it turn into something that defines us.”
On a day of anguish and mourning, other details emerged about how, but not why, the devastating attack had happened, turning a place where children were supposed to be safe into a national symbol of heartbreak and horror.
The Newtown school superintendent said the principal and the school psychologist had been shot as they tried to tackle the gunman in order to protect their students.
That was just one act of bravery during the maelstrom. There were others, said the superintendent, Janet Robinson. She said one teacher had helped children escape through a window. Another shoved students into a room with a kiln and held them there until the danger had passed.
It was not enough: First responders described a scene of carnage in the two classrooms where the children were killed, with no movement and no one left to save, everything perfectly still.
The gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, 20, had grown up in Newtown and had an uncle who had been a police officer in New Hampshire. The uncle, James M. Champion, issued a statement expressing “heartfelt sorrow,” adding that the family was struggling “to comprehend the tremendous loss we all share.”
A spokesman for the Connecticut State Police, Lt. J. Paul Vance, said investigators continued to press for information about Mr. Lanza, and had collected “some very good evidence.” He also said that the one survivor of the killings, a woman who was shot and wounded at the school, would be “instrumental” in piecing together what had happened.
But it was unclear why Mr. Lanza had gone on the attack. A law enforcement official said investigators had not found a suicide note or messages that spoke to the planning of such a deadly attack. And Ms. Robinson, the school superintendent, said they had found no connection between Mr. Lanza’s mother and the school, in contrast to accounts from authorities on Friday that said she had worked there.
Dr. Carver said it appeared that all of the children had been killed by a “long rifle” that Mr. Lanza was carrying; a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle was one of the several weapons police found in the school. The other guns were semiautomatic pistols, including a 10-millimeter Glock and a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer.
The bullets Mr. Lanza used were “designed in such a fashion the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in,” resulting in deep damage, Dr. Carver said. As to how many bullets Mr. Lanza had fired, Dr. Carver said he did not have an exact count. “There were lots of them,” he said.
He said that parents had identified their children from photographs to spare them from seeing the gruesome results of the rampage. He said that 4 doctors and 10 technicians had done the autopsies and that he had personally performed seven, all on first-graders.
“This is probably the worst I have seen or the worst that I know of any of my colleagues having seen,” said Dr. Carver, who is 60 and has been Connecticut’s chief medical examiner since 1989.
He said that only Mr. Lanza and his first victim — his mother, Nancy Lanza — remained to be autopsied. He said he would do those post-mortems on Sunday.
Officials said the killing spree began early on Friday at the house where the Lanzas lived. There, Mr. Lanza shot his mother in the face, making her his first victim, the authorities said. Then, after taking three guns that belonged to her, they said, he climbed into her car for the short drive to the school.
Outfitted in combat gear, Mr. Lanza shot his way in, defeating a security system requiring visitors to be buzzed in. This contradicted earlier reports that he had been recognized and allowed to enter the one-story building. “He was not voluntarily let into the school at all,” Lieutenant Vance said. “He forced his way in.”
The lieutenant’s account was consistent with recordings of police dispatchers who answered call after call from adults at the school. “The front glass has been broken,” one dispatcher cautioned officers who were rushing there, repeating on the police radio what a 911 caller had said on the phone. “They are unsure why.”
The dispatchers kept up a running account of the drama at the school. “The individual I have on the phone indicates continuing to hear what he believes to be gunfire,” one dispatcher said.
Soon, another dispatcher reported that the “shooting appears to have stopped,” and the conversation on the official radios turned to making sure that help was available — enough help.
“What is the number of ambulances you will require?” a dispatcher asked.
The answer hinted at the unthinkable scope of the tragedy: “They are not giving us a number.”
Another radio transmission, apparently from someone at the school, underlined the desperation: “You might want to see if the surrounding towns can send E.M.S. personnel. We’re running out real quick, real fast.”
Inside the school, teachers and school staff members had scrambled to move children to safety as the massacre began. Maryann Jacob, a library clerk, said she initially herded students behind a bookcase against a wall “where they can’t be seen.” She said that spot had been chosen in practice drills for school lockdowns, but on Friday, she had to move the pupils to a storage room “because we discovered one of our doors didn’t lock.”
Ms. Jacob said the storage room had crayons and paper that they tore up for the children to color while they waited. “They were asking what was going on,” she said. “We said: ‘We don’t know. Our job is just to be quiet.’ ” But she said that she did know, because she had called the school office and learned that the school was under siege.
It was eerily silent in the school when police officers rushed in with their rifles drawn. There were the dead or dying in one section of the building, while elsewhere, those who had eluded the bullets were under orders from their teachers to remain quiet in their hiding places.
The officers discovered still more carnage: After gunning down the children and the school employees, the authorities said, Mr. Lanza had killed himself.
The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, 47, and the psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56, were among the dead, as were the teachers Rachel Davino, 29; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; and Victoria Soto, 27. Lauren Rousseau, 30, had started as a full-time teacher in September after years of working as a substitute. “It was the best year of her life,” The News-Times quoted her mother [ http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Lauren-Rousseau-The-best-year-of-her-life-4120850.php ], Teresa, a copy editor at the newspaper, as saying.
Ms. Soto reportedly shooed her first graders into closets and cabinets when she heard the first shots, and then, by some accounts, told the gunman the youngsters were in the gym. Her cousin, James Willsie, told ABC News [ http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/tragedy-elementary-school-fallen-teachers-story-17980665 ] that she had “put herself between the gunman and the kids.”
“She lost her life protecting those little ones,” he said.
School officials have said there are no immediate plans to reopen Sandy Hook Elementary. Staff members will gather at the high school on Monday to discuss what happened, and students will be assigned to attend other schools by Wednesday.
Dorothy Werden, 49, lives across the street from Christopher and Lynn McDonnell, who lost their daughter Grace, 7, in the rampage. Ms. Werden remembered seeing Grace get on a bus Friday, as she did every morning at 8:45. Shortly afterward, she received a call that there had been a lockdown at the school — something that happens periodically, she said, because there is a prison nearby. It was only when she saw police cars from out of town speed past her that she knew something was seriously wrong.
Like the rest of the nation, she said, local residents were struggling with a single question: Why?
“Why did he have to go to the elementary school and kill all of those defenseless children?” Ms. Werden asked.
Reporting was contributed by Matt Flegenheimer, Thomas Kaplan and Ray Rivera from Connecticut, and Joseph Goldstein, N. R. Kleinfield, William K. Rashbaum, Marc Santora, Michael Schwirtz and Wendy Ruderman from New York and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.
The rise of the Second Amendment as a serious obstacle to U.S. gun control legislation is astonishingly recent.
Its rise is a tribute less to the vision of the Founding Fathers than to the skill, money and power of the contemporary gun-rights movement, which has not only exerted disproportionate influence on Congress, but also helped transform [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-28/gun-rights-must-be-honored-by-states-cities-high-court-says-in-5-4-vote.html ] the landscape of constitutional argument. We should be able to have a serious national discussion uninhibited by wild and unsupportable claims about the meaning of the Constitution.
Here’s a quick way to see how rapidly things have changed. Warren Burger was a conservative Republican, appointed U.S. chief justice by President Richard Nixon in 1969. In a speech [ http://www.tnr.com/topics/warren-e.-burger# ] in 1992, six years after his retirement from the court, Burger declared that “the Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all.” In his view, the purpose of the Second Amendment was only “to ensure that the ‘state armies’ -- ‘the militia’ -- would be maintained for the defense of the state.”
A year before, Burger went even further. On “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Burger said the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud -- I repeat the word ‘fraud’ -- on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” Burger wasn’t in the habit of taking stands on controversial constitutional questions on national television. In using the word “fraud,” Burger meant to describe what he saw as a clear consensus about the meaning of the Constitution.
Ambiguous Text
To understand what Burger was thinking, consider the words of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Fair- minded readers have to acknowledge that the text is ambiguous. Sure, it could fairly be read to support an individual right to have guns. But in light of the preamble, with its reference to a well-regulated militia, it could also be read not to confer an individual right, but to protect federalism, by ensuring that the new national government wouldn’t interfere with citizen militias at the state level.
A lot of historians believe, with Chief Justice Burger, that some version of the latter interpretation is the right one. Until remarkably recently, almost all federal judges have agreed. It is striking that before its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZS.html ]the Supreme Court had never held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have guns.
For almost seven decades, the court’s leading decision was U.S. v. Miller. [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0307_0174_ZO.html ] The 1939 case involved a ban on the possession of a sawed-off shotgun. Sounding like Burger, the court unanimously said that the Second Amendment’s “obvious purpose” was “to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of” the militia. Without evidence that the possession of a sawed-off shotgun was related to preservation of a well-regulated militia, the court refused to say that the Second Amendment protected the right to have such a weapon.
For decades, federal courts overwhelmingly rejected the conclusion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. It wasn’t until the 21st century that lower federal courts, filled with appointees of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, started to adopt the individual-rights position. And, of course, the Supreme Court itself adopted that view in 2008, by a 5-to-4 vote.
Cautious Path
I am not saying that the court was wrong. The legal question is genuinely difficult, and people disagree in good faith how to solve it. What is important to see is that in the very recent past, the U.S. has lived through a Second Amendment revolution, spurred by an intensely focused and well-funded social movement with both legal and political arms.
More important still, the Supreme Court has proceeded cautiously, and it has pointedly refused to shut the door to all gun regulation. On the contrary, the court said, [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/us/01scotus.html?_r=0 ]“Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
To this the court added that the sorts of weapons it was protecting were those “in common use at the time” that the Second Amendment was ratified. We should respect the fact that the individual right to have guns has been established, but a lot of gun-control legislation, imaginable or proposed, would be perfectly consistent with the court’s rulings.
In the political arena, opponents [ In the political arena, opponents ] of gun control, armed with both organization and money, have been invoking the Second Amendment far more recklessly, treating it as a firm obstacle to any effort to regulate guns and bullets. As a result, they have made it difficult for Congress, and many state legislatures, even to hold serious discussions about what sorts of regulation might save lives. Consider this disturbing statement [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/us/lanza-used-a-popular-ar-15-style-rifle-in-newtown.html?pagewanted=all ] by Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer who has represented the National Rifle Association, about the very kinds of guns used in the Connecticut tragedy: “They get a lot of coverage when there’s a tragedy, but the number of people unlawfully killed with them is small.”
Reasonable people can debate about what policies would actually work. That is a debate worth having. It is past time to stop using the Second Amendment itself as a loaded weapon, threatening elected representatives who ought to be doing their jobs.
A member of the Republican-controlled legislature plans during its upcoming session to introduce a bill that would allow the state to pay for secretly armed teachers in classrooms so, the sponsor told TPM, potential shooters don’t know who has a gun and who doesn’t.
As has been seen following other mass shootings, there’s a strong segment of the gun rights lobby that says the answer to events like the one in Newtown is more guns in more places .. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/12/manchin-warner-gun-control.php . But they’ve said the recent massacre shows how important it is to put guns into elementary schools, where even gun-friendly states like Tennessee don’t currently allow them.
State Sen. Frank Niceley (R) told TPM on Tuesday he believes it’s time for that to change. He plans to introduce legislation in the next session, which begins Jan. 8, that will require all schools to have an armed staff member of some kind. The current language of the bill — which is in its early form — would allow for either a so-called “resource officer” (essentially an armed police officer, the kind which most Tennessee high schools have already) or an armed member of the faculty or staff in every school in the state. The choice would allow schools that can’t afford a resource officer to fulfill the requirement without having to pay for anything beyond the cost of the training and, presumably, the weapon. But Niceley said schools should use the wiggle room to train and keep on hand armed staff not in uniform.
That’s the best way to protect students, he said.
“Say some madman comes in. The first person he would probably try to take out was the resource officer. But if he doesn’t know which teacher has training, then he wouldn’t know which one had [a gun],” Niceley said by phone. “These guys are obviously cowards anyway and if someone starts shooting back, they’re going to take cover, maybe go ahead and commit suicide like most of them have.”
Niceley’s proposal has gathered some high-level interest. Tennessee’s governor told reporters .. http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/dec/17/haslam-mental-health-services-key-in-preventing/ .. Monday that he’s open to including it on the agenda for a January conference to discuss school safety. Nicely said he expect the governor “to be receptive” to his plan to use tax money to arm and train teachers.
Asked about concerns from gun control advocates .. http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/brady-campaign-we-have-to-demand-change-on .. that putting more guns in schools in the wake of Newtown might make them more dangerous, Niceley said the sentiment was naive. Not only does an unarmed school leave itself unprotected, he said, it also presents a tempting target.
“Look at it this way, you never see one of these whacko shooters go to a gun show and start shooting. They don’t go down to the police station and start shooting,” he said. “They go to places we advertise are gun-free.”
School resource officers are paid jointly by the local sheriff’s department and the school district. Niceley’s bill would allow schools to pay for background checks and firearms training for teachers that woud allow them to be armed as well. Asked if the guns for the trained teachers would also be part of the taxpayer expense, Niceley laughed.
“Well, that’s a minor detail in Tennessee,” he said. “We hoped the teachers would have them already.”
The teachers that would be trained would be volunteers, he said, and would likely carry their own firearms to school.
====== .. question for Frank Niceley, 4000+ in Iraq? .. most all armed?
Arming Teachers, School Cops Could Cause More Harm Than Good, Experts Say
Posted: 12/18/2012 7:51 pm EST
A nation shaken by Friday's school shooting in Newtown, Conn., is wondering what to do to prevent future tragedies. Some gun rights advocates have suggested returning to a time-worn strategy in lieu of gun control: keeping up with the proliferation of arms outside the schoolhouse doors by arming those inside.
If the principal of Sandy Hook had been armed with an M-4 carbine, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) argued .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/louie-gohmert-guns_n_2311379.html .. on "Fox News Sunday," she could have stopped the tragedy crucial minutes before the police. She could have "take(n) his head off before he [could] kill those precious kids."
It is an argument using the logic of what critics call the "maximum guns" school of thought about preventing violence at schools. Though schools rarely arm teachers themselves .. http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/12/14/4486104/texas-school-where-teachers-carry.html , armed police are a frequent sight inside many American schools. But school safety and child psychology experts surveyed by The Huffington Post said there is no guarantee that putting more guns in schools, even in the hands of trained police officers, will stop rampage killings -- and that increased school security could come at the cost of children's well-being.
The deadly and ever more popular assault rifles widely available for legal purchase, meanwhile, have prompted police to respond with higher-powered weapons of their own. In August, before a public outcry stopped the plan, police in Plainfield, Ill., proposed storing AR-15 assault rifles -- similar to the type that Lanza used -- in secure lockers inside high schools. It was a preventive measure, they said .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/guns-in-school-plainfield_n_1823107.html , against a "worst-case scenario."
Bill Bond is one of the few who knows the school shooter scenario firsthand. He was the principal at Heath High School in Paducah, Ky., in 1997, when a 14-year-old opened fire on a student prayer group. Bond came out of his office to confront the gunman face-to-face. He said he has no doubts about how that day would have ended if he had done what Gohmert suggests.
The shooter "stood against a wall and shot eight kids and three of them died. That took 12 seconds. It is fast," said Bond, who is now the specialist for school safety for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. If he had been running toward the shooter with a weapon in his hands, he believes, he would have been shot. "I was able to take the gun from him, but I believe if I had been armed, I would have been dead."
When a former student killed seven people at a high school in Red Lake, Minn., in 2005, Bond noted, the first target he went for was the unarmed school security guard. And against a gunman with an arsenal like Lanza's, Bond said, even a police officer with a handgun would have had little chance.
Many police officers, on the other hand, claim that while they might not be able to stop a determined shooter's first bullet, they can minimize the scope of a tragedy. Their claims may be supported by the fact that Adam Lanza apparently killed himself, ending his rampage at Sandy Hook, only when he heard police were getting close to the school.
"You may not be able to stop the first [shot]," said Kevin Quinn, a school police officer who is president of the National Association of School Resource Officers. "Even in my own school, where I'm sitting in my office 50 feet from the first door, if someone broke in the front door and fired one shot, I can't stop it."
What cops can do though, he argued, is "attempt to minimize the damages, minimize the casualties ... every second could mean several lives."
In recent years, federal support for a program to put cops in schools has slipped .. http://www.washingtonguardian.com/washingtons-school-security-failure . But it is not clear how the program could have prevented tragedies like the one in Newtown, as elementary schools are rarely a priority for strapped cities and towns. According to the Justice Department, over the lifetime of a federal program that supports local police hiring, only around 1 percent of the officers hired went to work in elementary schools.
Critics, meanwhile, say the loss of school policing programs are nothing to lament. In far too many schools, they say, cops have turned what should be places of learning into semi-militarized environments.
"Singular horrible events like this past week make us all upset, but if we look at the data, it doesn't make sense that that's where we need to beef up security in a very expensive way -- not only financially but also at the cost of our children's feeling of security," said Kenneth Dodge, director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.
Less than 2 percent of homicides committed against children happen at school, Dodge said. A November 2011 report by the Justice Policy Institute found little correlation .. http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/educationunderarrest_fullreport.pdf .. between the number of cops at schools and the number of student-reported violent incidents. An article published in the Journal of School Health .. http://www.edweek.org/media/hankin-02security.pdf .. in 2011, reviewing 15 years of studies of metal detectors at schools, found that there was insufficient evidence to support the conclusion they made schools safer, but plenty to suggest they made students feel more unsafe.
The JPI report argued that police do have another, detrimental effect on the educational environment: They essentially turn every disciplinary offense into a potential crime. And the review of metal detectors found plenty to suggest that they create a climate of fear.
Metal detectors, police officers in hallways, and zero tolerance policies have "been a failure in that they make children anxious, they make schools less welcoming," Dodge said.
To stop determined shooters from killing children anywhere, Dodge said, "we'd have to put fences up around our school parking lots, and we'd probably have to do the same around shopping malls and parks and everywhere kids go."
That is not necessarily a bad idea, said Quinn of the school police officers' association, who suggested there should be more police everywhere children congregate. "The way things are going now, it sure as heck couldn't hurt," he said.
But Dodge argued for a different path -- one that looks at school safety as a consequence of the larger problems with violence in America. "Isn't it more straightforward to just get rid of the guns?"
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