Saturday, January 12, 2013

Just get rid of the guns, and stop with the dangerous more-guns-solutionss

An Ohio School district wants to arm their janitors. There is no clear indication how the janitors feel about this, or if they get paid extra for hazardous duty or additional responsibilities, or if they will be covered by the school for any increased liability risk.

Ohio school district votes to allow janitors to carry guns on campus 

The 5-0 vote came a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The custodians in Montpelier will be required to take a two-day training course

 An Ohio school district has voted unanimously to allow custodians to carry guns to work.

Janitors at the K-12 campus of the school in Montpelier, a town of about 4,000 people, will now be able to pack heat after completing a two-day handgun training course.
The 5-0 vote on Wednesday came a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. and as the Obama administration considers funding police officers in public schools to secure campuses.
It's a bad idea. If anyone needs an example of WHY it is a bad idea, there is this incident less than two years ago, where the janitor shot the principal:

Principal Sam LaCara fatally shot at Placerville school 

PLACERVILLE, CA - The principal of a Placerville elementary school has died after being shot on campus Wednesday morning.  A school janitor and close friend has been arrested.

Louisiana Schnell Elementary School Principal Sam LaCara, 50, was pronounced dead at Placerville's Marshall Hospital at 11:16 a.m., said Placerville Chief of Police George Nielsen.  Nielsen said LaCara had been shot at least once in the upper torso.
John Luebbers, 43, a custodian at the school was taken into custody in the shooting at his El Dorado residence a little after noon. The shooting was first reported at 10:37 a.m. on the Schnell campus located at 2871 Schnell School Road, according to the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office.
Nielsen said it was unclear what kind of dispute may have precipitated the shooting.
Now generally speaking, most of the staff in schools are wonderful. The head janitor at my elementary school in particular, whom we all called Mr. Harold (his first name), was an especially kind and comforting man to unhappy kids who got sick and threw up on a hallway floor, who were embarrassed about making a mess.  I can no more imagine him or the other staff pulling a gun and shooting someone.  Telling them to wipe their muddy feet before walking down a freshly cleaned hallway, maybe; but not killing or maiming someone.  And that is exactly the kind of person we should have in our schools, not someone with an assault style rifle over their shoulders, belt webbing full of ammo, and a plunger or a mop in their hands.

But the problems with arming any staff is that it's not what they're hired to do, and it's not as if even with the background checks we do now, we don't have staff problems, like this, from just yesterday;, or this, from this past summer; or this, from a year ago spring;or this, fall of 2012.  
There are stories like this every month, in every season, in every aspect of school, at every age level of school, equally in public and parochial schools, in every part of the country.  So far, the ONLY reason that schools have not had gun violence is that they are nearly always gun free zones, not that adults don't make horrible mistakes of judgment or conduct in them.

No matter how wonderful our educators and their staff members are most of the time, we have to ask ourselves two things.  The first, do we want them to do the job they were hired to do, or do we want them to do something else that is very different, and for which they might have at most a day or two of training, and questionable aptitude? And given how often there are problems with the judgment of our school employees, just as there are problems with the conduct of people in other professions, like medicine and the clergy........do we really want to add firearms to the scope of what could go wrong, with so little relative potential for this to go well?

I would argue that given the nature of the risk that firearms ownership has, especially for people who have children in their homes, that having guns in schools is not nearly as potentially successful a solution as reducing the number of guns, and being more strict about permitting guns in homes and in public.  We need higher standards, more stringent control and regulation, and we need just plain fewer guns in the hands of Americans who are killing themselves and each other. What we don't need is MORE GUNS, least of all in our schools. 
 

6 comments:

  1. I was a custodian at a health spa when I was a teen. The thought of doing that job AND working as security is ludicrous.

    And I hate to stereotype, but let's face it, many people who work as janitors do that job because they are not qualified enough or educated enough to do less "dirty" jobs. Is that the sort of person we want to arm and tell to protect us? Police and security professionals have a great deal of training, vetting, and background checking to get to where they are. Janitors, not so much. This is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard.

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  2. Look, just because they don't NOW know how to be killer janitors doesn't mean that they can't learn.

    That James Yeager fella down there to Tennessee, he can he'p 'em out with the training, soon's he gets his gunz permit back.

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  3. Not to mention that custodians are all over the school. Often they can be found in the furnace room. Sometimes they are mopping the floor with both hands on the mop. Sometimes they are putting tables and chairs up or down in the cafeteria using both hands. Sometimes they are changing light bulbs or helping a teacher move something heavy. Or sometimes they are outside removing snow from sidewalks. Sometimes they are in the gym, and then in the library and then in the office or after school, they might be seen actually chatting with kids and parents. I'm just sure that, given all of that, they will be in exactly the right place at the right time to stop a shooter wherever he/she enters the school. And his/her gun should be strapped to his or her hip at all times, even when bending over to clean up a mess on the floor or reaching up to fix something on the top shelf. What could possibly go wrong?

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  4. You made a good point that nobody asked the janitors how the felt about this. Same with teachers. How many 1st grade teachers in Connecticut would want to carry a gun even if they could?

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  5. There was a reference made to a school shooting that the "media won't talk about" on one of the blogs I was on yesterday, it came from here:

    http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/01/school-shooting-in-tennessee-that.html

    It is being used as a model for how arming people in schools works. It's a massive FAIL on several levels.

    To me the most damning bit of evidence is that WITH an armed, uniformed professional IN the building, one who confronted the gunman while he was still in the lobby of the building, the shooter managed to get INTO the main building.

    This:

    "Riden fled and Gudger inched back into the school, leading Cowan through the scattered pastel chairs in the empty cafeteria. It was a tactical move, meant to lure the gunman into a more contained place"

    sounds like absolute bullshit.

    I would hazard that the armed professional did not want to SHOOT the other person. That's it. If they had wanted to shoot the guy they would have shot him in the lobby.

    The elephant in the room that NONE of teh gunzloonz want to deal with is how many people, armed and range trained are willing to just shoot somebody that they don't know much about. Obviously there are a lot of gunzloonz who will do such a thing; that is evidenced by the number of people who get shot for stealing a toaster oven or some other piece of easily replaced property. Is someone who will shoot a person for petty theft the sort of person you want in a building full of amped up kids?

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  6. Awesome blog. I also have a take on arming janitors to fend off deranged killers on my blog. In case you are interested it is: http://profoundrevelations.blogspot.com/

    Keep up the good work.
    Regards,
    Tom Dye, The Safety Guy

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