Dakota, don't school your kids there!!

[Jarlaxle]

I could crank out magazines (which are extremely simple to make) from any decent high school metal shop

I don't suspect if someone were making magazines at a high school metal shop that it would remain a secret for long.

I could make guns at a good fab shop

See above.

Hey, here's an idea: quote and respond to my ENTIRE POST, and don't cherry-pick one part of it!

[Scooter]

Hey, here's an idea, propose alternatives that are realistically conducive to large scale manufacture of weapons. Newsflash, but your average gangbanger wouldn't know CAD-CAM from Caddyshack.

The point is that if gun manufacturers were not able to make the sorts of weapons people would like to get off the street, they would be almost impossible to obtain. Or are you joining rubato in a chorus of "if it isn't 100% effective it's useless"?

[Jarlaxle]

Newsflash: there are something like 300,000,000 guns in this country. For every weapon that uses them, there are two to ten magazines. Large-scale manufacture simply IS NOT NECESSARY! THINK!

Alternatives? OK: lock up the criminals for a very long time. Felon with a gun? 15 years. Commit a felony with an illegal gun? Life without parole in solitary confinement. Steal a gun? 25-life.

[rubato]

"... Or are you joining rubato in a chorus of "if it isn't 100% effective it's useless"?

Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Bush I
Clinton
Bush II


99.99% is less than 100% but then so is 66%.

Out of the most recent 9 presidents two were shot and one of those was killed and Ford would have died if Squeaky Fromme had known how to use a gun. Robert Kennedy was shot and killed and Wallace was shot and paralysed during the same period while running for the office. Saying that the SS were "less than 100% effective" was intended as understatement. I was overestimating the ability of my audience in assuming that they could do a simple arithmetic problem and then realize that if hundreds of millions of dollars protecting a single individual could be only 66% effective then armed guards costing much less are so far from useful as not to be worth considering.





yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

Newsflash: there are something like 300,000,000 guns in this country. For every weapon that uses them, there are two to ten magazines. Large-scale manufacture simply IS NOT NECESSARY! THINK!

Alternatives? OK: lock up the criminals for a very long time. Felon with a gun? 15 years. Commit a felony with an illegal gun? Life without parole in solitary confinement. Steal a gun? 25-life.

Long sentences and determinate sentencing have been the norm for several decades and did nothing to prevent Newtown. Requiring the gun owner to lock up her guns and ammunition in a safe would have.


yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

I was overestimating the ability of my audience

No, actually what you are doing is either overestimating your ability to remember what you actually said, or underestimating everyone else's ability to do so....

After you made the remark about armed security not being 100% effective, in a following post you said: (verbatim quote):

Having more armed guards does nothing to improve security

But by all means feel free to continue digging....

[rubato]

Well, there's that Rubeian Math again...

If something is not "100% effective," it therefore does "absolutely nothing".....

Applying that same "logic" people shouldn't bother with vaccinations, wearing seatbelts, or any other protective measure, since not being 100% effective, they do absolutely nothing....

But for an event that is already relatively rare, less than 100% effective can amount to close to nothing. And it's hard to put a price on a life, particularly the life of a child, but putting an army of armed guards in schools across the country is not going to be cheap by any means. Someone is going to have to be willing to take the flak for doing the math and determining if it's really worth it.

Per a quick check there are about 110,000 schools in the US. Providing 2 officers per school at a cost* of $60,000 each is about $6.6 Billion dollars; not an enormous sum. But also not effective. Putting low-paid people with guns in schools where on average less than 1 in 100 of them will ever meet a deadly threat is stupid. No one can remain at a usefully-high level of alertness for that long with no actual threat to confront. And if the school shooter knows about the guards they would be easy to kill by surprise. Much easier than killing two DAs who were armed and alerted to the threat before hand. And putting guns in schools creates the possibility that a gun will get into the wrong hands. Guns are inherently dangerous.


And again I did not say that any measure had to be 100% effective to be of use. I said, for those paying attention, that the track record of that method was so FAR from 100% as to be foolish.


yrs,
rubato

* Cost per person is much higher than salary.

[Lord Jim]

Now you are attempting to pull your all too familiar intellectually dishonest stunt where you try to substitute something else for what you actually said, and then pretend they mean the same thing....

But as Rocky said to Bullwinkle, "That trick never works"...

[rubato]

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."


Samuel Beckett "Murphy"

[Lord Jim]

That's true rube, you've tried to pull this many times, absolutely nothing new about it....


(But I'll give you this; deciding to go with some bit of prose rather than continuing to dig was a wise decision on your part. )

[Econoline]

AGAIN....

What I can never understand is why, when confronted with a quote like this:

Having more armed guards does nothing to improve security

...why oh why can't he just do what a normal person would do, i.e., admit that it was an exaggeration and that what he should have said, or meant to say, was "Having more armed guards does little to improve security." Then the discussion here could simply continue, rather than metamorphose into yet ANOTHER pointless discussion about "what did rubato say?"

[rubato]

AGAIN....

What I can never understand is why, when confronted with a quote like this:

Having more armed guards does nothing to improve security

...why oh why can't he just do what a normal person would do, i.e., admit that it was an exaggeration and that what he should have said, or meant to say, was "Having more armed guards does little to improve security." Then the discussion here could simply continue, rather than metamorphose into yet ANOTHER pointless discussion about "what did rubato say?"

In the context of the discussion having more armed guards does nothing to improve school security. It is stupid to say they do.

You have to recall that you are asking a human being to be at a state of high alert year in and year out for their entire career, for decades, when there is only an infinitesimal chance that this level of alertness will ever be needed. Frankly I think it is stupid to think that will be better than nothing and ...

The number of armed attacks on schools is very small, they are rare events. Putting armed guards in EVERY school puts guns in places they were not before. The probability of some low-paid armed guard losing their weapon to someone else is high relative to the chance that they will ever prevent any armed attack at all. The probability of an accidental discharge is greater. The police dept office at UCSC has a bullet hole in the wall formed by the RANGE MASTER for the department who was showing another officer how to safely unload a glock (ca 1988) and fired it accidentally. Guns are inherently dangerous things and it is often the case that putting them into a situation raises the risks rather than lowering them.

It is stupid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ufT_6Kgy0





yrs,
rubato

[oldr_n_wsr]

You have to recall that you are asking a human being to be at a state of high alert year in and year out for their entire career, for decades, when there is only an infinitesimal chance that this level of alertness will ever be needed. Frankly I think it is stupid to think that will be better than nothing and ...

The number of armed attacks on schoolsbanks is very small, they are rare events. Putting armed guards in EVERY school bank puts guns in places they were not before. The probability of some low-paid armed guard losing their weapon to someone else is high relative to the chance that they will ever prevent any armed attack at all. The probability of an accidental discharge is greater.

There are a geat many more banks than there are schools. I know of 5 banks near the one school in my neighborhood and every bank has an armed guard and not one of those banks has been robbed in the 28 years I have lived here. Thoe guards must be fast asleep by now as the bank is infinitely more boring than a school.

[MajGenl.Meade]

oldr, banks have always had armed guards. Yet the late 19th and early 20th centuries were replete with armed bank robberies in broad daylight. What's changed that situation is not armed guards but better non-human security, dye-stains and other innovations plus traffic congestion and many other factors. It is a logical fallacy of cause and effect that you're relying on there.

post hoc ergo propter hoc

Meade

[Scooter]

I know of 5 banks near the one school in my neighborhood and every bank has an armed guard and not one of those banks has been robbed in the 28 years I have lived here.

There are probably 5 or 6 banks within a few blocks of my home, none of whom have armed guards, and none of which (to my knowledge) have been robbed in the 21 years I have lived here.

Different societies I guess.

[Econoline]

My favorite comment so far on this topic (from another blog):

I went to Catholic schools taught by nuns (grade school) and brothers (High School). There is no way i would ever have lived through my school life if my teachers had been armed!! You can dodge erasers, but bullets??