Text wall, cause undealt with trauma: Legitimately sorry I'm dealing with my issues on your conversation. I'm probably sticking these in a book one day though, so if I bothered you just think about all that sweet sweet recognition you could potentially get maybe.
TL;DR I lived in the south, sister-school shot up by transfer from my school (that I knew), gun free zone didn't do shit, I wish good teachers had guns so my kids and the kids there now aren't fish in an unarmed barrel. Also I'm going insane a little. Thanks Mom.
I had a school shooter in my gym class the year before he moved to the other middle school. Hammad Memon. He openly mocked the gym teachers, saying they wouldn't do any "real shit" to him, and he could do whatever he wanted. He sobered up when they called the armed school resource officers. He either respected them, or was scared of them. Either way.
He moved schools, and shot a kid in the head as they were coming back from lunch. We got lucky he just wanted that one kid dead, apparently for a gang initiation his brother set him to do. If he wanted to, he could have opened up on that entire crowd. He knew where the people with guns were, and knew they wouldn't do any "real shit".
I don't know any details beyond that, but I know what changed. I talked to one of the chattier officers, while they were milling around after a presentation. I was 15, stupid (inb4 WAS?), and thought I knew some shit about security, I wanted stuff to change. The doors were too open. We spent too much time in large crowds. They humored me and said they already worked on it. They said they wouldn't tell anyone the design of their security, but I could calm down. There are "substitutes" who are undercover cops sometimes. They help out with the mentally challenged kids. Now there are armed SRO's at every soft point, they do rounds so as to have a certain response time.
In my opinion, those guns keep crazy people, aggressive people, damaged people, taking from advantage of the weak. Its a sad fact of life that they do that. We really shouldn't have to worry about it, but security will always have softpoints and criminals by definition flout laws. Ignoring reality it isn't going to help. My question to you is: why can't we have this protection in schools? Not a blanket "guns for all", no student certainly should have weapons inside the building. But we cant say we "don't need guns in schools PERIOD" because schools are precisely where we need our children need to be protected. I'm not a fan of increasing government oversight into our lives, the nature of government is to expand and refuse to contract, with an inefficiency only rivaled by Soviet models. But you will not find many people in the South objecting to a strict licensing process to allow certain teachers to carry weapons. There are certain members of the community you trust, and rightly so. The Principal, Superintendant, and the SRO together should evaluate a teachers ability to carry, each with a veto UN style. The majority of my sports teachers are trusted to drive a bus. If they wanted to kill kids, they could easily off them 100 different ways on trips, in the bus, or any way they can think of with a 10 ton death machine (no seatbelts). I personally would have felt easier at school knowing that the men and women I trust could defend me faster than hoping the SRO's were close by in their rounds.
I like to be optimistic and think it was the taser, or the authority, maybe I wasn't in any danger at all from the psycho kid. The kid who killed someone my age a year after I last saw him. Looking at the culture he steeped himself in though, I knew it had to be the gun. It wasn't Black culture, it was ghetto culture. You see it not just in American places. You see it more extremely in Favelas, the slums of Cairo, Israel, Russia, even some Nordic countries now. Young men with aggression, ambition, a desire to compete and win, but no competition to excel at. No niche, a consequence of our scaled up tribal existence and too little space, too little opportunity. Forgotten kids, kids I wish I could talk to and tutor, I want to reach. But the second they decide to take another kid's life for it, they cross a line human's don't easily come back from. If they decide they are shooting another innocent, they aren't all that innocent. If they buy into the struggle so hard they think it excuses hurting others, they switch into the bump in the night humans have protective urges to fend off. A threat, not a sad kid anymore. That makes me sad. Made me weep, once or twice, after a few conversations made it clear.
I talked it over with my parents, a kinda worried kid getting hugs for still being alive. My mom cried on my shoulder a little. We were safe. I firmly believe that having that resource officer on Hamad's ass all the time kept him from seeing an opportunity. I saw how little respect for life he had, at the time I thought it was kinda cool. There were all these people ordering me around that I didn't respect, and only fear of my parents kept me from being an ass to them. Turns out, Hamad just didn't care about his life anymore, outside of how he looked. I didn't get him.
I trust the armed people at my schools. The people carrying them are trusted enough to be alone with students, they have psych evals, are under scrutiny and watch by relevant authorities. I don't trust the cop pulling me over in front of the school, hes looking for a quota. The SRO's keep their plum job either as pre-retirement gift or from sheer charisma and trust. I loved all of my SRO's, I went to church with one, back when church still made me happy. My parents talked about the shooting, we knew that if the shit hit the fan each of those men would be in front of us taking a bullet in a heartbeat. Our SRO at liberty was an older, grey haired, nigh bald man. We trusted him. He had that same sense of tired duty you see in jaded mall cops, paired with very real memories of things no mall cop dealt with. He told us he had seen OD's, drunken car accidents, suicides, the works. We knew any of our problems were literal child's play to him. We all laughed when he chased down Fat Tony, the stinky kid, the asshole who dealt shitty weed out of his locker ten yards from the SRO's office. Predictably, he got caught, chased outside, and tackled ignominiously on the way into the woods. Took three men to lift him into the squad car. I think he was almost a lost cause, he hated everyone. I never questioned if he might decide to take all that rage out on us until Hamad shattered our stupid Suburban ideal.
We were so vulnerable, we got so lucky. We couldn't prevent everything, but we can prevent much worse.
You don't understand gun culture in the south. I was 12 when my dad brought me out to a shooting range for the first time. He made it very clear that safety came first. Not fun. This was serious. He drilled me multiple times on the key things. Never point a gun at something you don't want dead. Always assume a chamber is live. Communicate before you begin firing. Never fire with someone downrange of you. Guns are for self defense, and god help you this wouldn't change unless you get drafted. No playing. My sister rolled her eyes at some of these and learned quickly that flippancy meant she sat out. He spoke long and laboriously about the nature of guns, how far we've come as humans to get here, and how quickly guns can end a person's life. We connected over over things. A fervent need to see Progress with a capital P, joy in our intelligence (or presumption of it. I feel less intelligent by the day in college). We didn't have to meet anywhere on guns. We were on the same page.
These can be very fun alone. The power, the knockback, the sound and the fury he said. My dad the engineer, closet poet. BUT. Pointed at another Human? That was danger, stupidity, or a dire struggle. No dreams of riding in the cavalry leveling a repeater at "savages", no aspirations of being on the boats in Dday.
He showed me one picture of a shotgun blast. The same type of birdshot we were using, that I had just gleefully pumped a campaign sign with a target taped over it full of. (From a person whom we dissaproved of, of course). The man in the picture was dead clearly, eerily. It was a suicide.
Dad doesn't remember doing this, and I question the activity myself. I'm fairly medicated, and at times dreams and old stories I daydreamed blend into reality. I have to reconstruct my history sometimes, and I'm scared some of it is more... fiction. Right now I just took a double dose to shrug off some lingering depression, Mom wasn't terribly good for my mental health, broken as she is. I swapped one compulsion for another really, I needed to type this out. I need to keep some of these memories. Even if that dead man swinging his jaw was something I saw on /r/WTF, and my fond memories are a shitty reconstruction of something I didn't pay attention to. I'll blame it on the ADHD and move on with what I can salvage of my life.
So, to answer your question in a roundabout and rambling way as possible, I will tell you what I think, based on what I have seen: Guns are tools. They can be used for good. They can be used well, badly, flippantly, carelessly, artfully, entertainingly, but ultimately they are an extension of your hand. They are a force multiplier, and I trust certain members of my community to responsibly bring that force to bear in protection of myself and my fellow man. I know we are dumb, scared, panicky animals. But I also know we can be better than that. I'm betting on being better than that, but for now we have to take steps to secure our well being before anything else. Food. Shelter. Security.
Health, Home, and Life. Basics, until we improve as a species. to the moon