Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: No.

Arm the teachers and all the teachers are targets.
Mary Anne — (archived)

Even the ones who didn't get into the profession to be bodyguards. Even the ones who can't fill that role because of their own personalities or moral positions.

Arm random students and you have a shootout. Unless someone is trained to shoot at a human being, accurately, you're only going to get multiple gunshots from multiple guns, ricochet, and more wounds.

I have yet to get this confirmed, but the VT shooter was originally reported to have been wearing "a vest" in one of the reports I heard. If indeed he was, then even a trained person would have been at a disadvantage, probably a fatal one. People trained to respond to armed assailants are trained to go for the chest, the largest target with the most opportunity to take the person down. If he was wearing a vest, the flash of return fire would have located his next target for him.

If you want to advocate for undercover marshalls assigned and trained specifically for this job, I can discuss this. There are obvious problems -- how do you tell who the marshall is in a wide-open environment like a campus, as opposed to the closed environment of an airplane? -- but it at least doesn't turn public spaces into an "every man for himself", fear-governed no man's land.

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