42 thoughts on “The School Shooting In Connecticut”

    1. A man would be both more likely to carry (if it were allowed inside the school, which I’m sure it’s not), and more likely to try to take on the gunman. Not that there aren’t women who wouldn’t, but men would be more likely to. And teaching has become a much more predominantly female profession, which makes a school an even more attractive target for such monsters.

    2. Jimbo, do you really need someone to explain this to you? I thought libs were all about identity politics anyway.

    3. I don’t know the reason for your question Jim, but I don’ t think it matters. No more than Susan Rice’s gender mattered in her incompetence. I know many women with CHLs, and once word came out that a child was even wounded, I’m sure they would have been happy to blow away this punk.

      1. Rand said he wondered how many of the teachers were male.

        I don’t think it matters. The presence of adult males does not seem to have done much to mitigate the severity of other mass shootings (Aurora, VA Tech, the Gabby Giffords shooting, Ft. Hood, etc.).

    4. A teacher cannot have gender. “Gender” is a grammatical term, not a biological term. Nouns have gender. Human beings such as teachers are of either the male or female sex.

  2. I think it’s way too early to be making political comments over this terrible incident. Most early news reports are wrong. We simply don’t know enough about the shooter (reportedly a 20 year old father of one of the school’s students), his motivations or what happened other than a lot of innocent people have been murdered. Anyone who attempts to say that those people were “in the wrong place at the wrong time” deserves to be punched repeatedly in the face.

    I can only express horror at what happened. I can’t imagine (and hope to never know) the grief so many families are feeling as their world has been gutted.

    Let the political whores attempt to score points over everything that happens in the world, good or bad. I don’t want to lower myself to that level.

    1. Most early news reports are wrong. We simply don’t know enough about the shooter (reportedly a 20 year old father of one of the school’s students)

      As you write, the latest is he’s a son of a teacher, which he apparently murder first prior to going to the school. Indeed, it’s just too early with so much happening. It’s not to criticize you. Actually, I want to emphasize your point.

      1. They’re also reporting that he’s 24 or “in his 20s”, so everything we’ve read is subject to revision.

        This is likely a good time to invoke the 48 hour rule. A high percentage of first news reports are crap, especially in a horrible story involving many senseless deaths. It’ll be days before we know enough to even begin having informed opinions.

        If there is a hell, I hope this shooter is in an especially unpleasant corner of it right now. He got off way too easy by (reportedly) killing himself. But then, that report could well be wrong, too.

        1. And where would the fun be without idle speculation and posturing? The Daily Show nailed this nicely a couple of days ago.

          I was thinking of tracking my own metric in terms of 2 of the 3 gun killing sprees in the UK since, er… 1986 I think, so you’ve had 4 Hungerfords and a Dunblane so far this year.

          2. Chicago has a total ban on civilian possession of firearms. They also have a Hungerford every day or two, all year long.

  3. As I recall, the bow-and-arrow killer at Casper College in Wyoming had been living in Connecticut before going back out West to commit his crimes.

  4. Note how the gun prohibitionists were silent about the state of American gun laws when Anders Breivik shot 100 people in Norway.

  6. Another shooting in a so-called ‘Gun-free’ zone.

    Waiting for the left to double-down on stupid and blame the gun while ignoring the real problems.

      1. Bloomberg said that the US is the only first world nation that has this problem. Germany (which has extremely strict gun bans) has had multiple mass shootings these recent years. Germany is a first world nation. Bloomberg is a liar.

    1. 22 kids attacked by a knife wielding nut in China doesn’t matter to American Leftists. There’s no upside to telling the story and it might actually make someone realize that crazy SOBs don’t NEED a gun, they just need opportunity.

      And the last thing any of the Left loving MSM want is for anyone thinking that crazy INDIVIDUALS are to blame for massacres, not guns.

  8. I just fund this quote from a father who said his daughter got out OK.
    .
    .
    “It’s alarming, especially in Newtown, Connecticut, which we always thought was the safest place in America,” he said.
    .
    .
    I’m not sure WHY people think shootings ONLY happen in NYC, L.A., Chicago or where-the-hell-ever. In fact these mass shootings often happen in smaller places. And to ass-u-me that you, your family or ANYONE is safe from violence based on the location where you reside is, IMHO, situational blindness.

  9. While taking the guns away from the people who DIDN’T commit this crime (or any others) is a stupid, kneejerk, reaction (and therefore we can expect Lefties and MSM hordes to start screaming for it now), the question, to me, is:

    Is there any on site defense that is effective?

    Like. how did this creep get into the school in the first place? When I went and visited my old Junior High school, I was stopped in the hallway and asked who I was and what I wanted there. This doesn’t seem to be happening these days. Can we station teachers at the door during the kid’s entrance and exit from the school, and then have the doors locked, with cameras, and people buzzed in by an authority, at all other times?

    Would it help if teachers had “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” pushbuttons on them so that they could punch the button and……

    …the on site cop can respond?

    On site cops are not a panacea – it can take them more time to get from one end of the school to the other than it takes for the creep to off 30 people and then themselves. (I heard these things take about 8 minutes or so). And the Cop has to find the creep. If you have a small town of 15 cops and 5 schools, then you’ve used up your 3 shifts of police forces. And having a cop on site is VERY expensive.

    Armed teachers are not as easy as it seems, at first blush. They would need training, have to be willing to carry, their existence can cause insurance problems for the school, and some teachers are whack jobs themselves. In junior high and high schools some of those kids are outright thugs and the teacher would have to be willing to defend against the thug trying for the weapon. Or a gang of thugs.

    What other ideas are there?

    It’s the government’s PRIMARY job to protect people. Gun control will fails (see above references plus the one in 1927 where a guy blew up a school with dynamite to protest the loss of his farm to a government taking).

    They better get cracking.

    1. Gregg,
      making sure there is a single entry choke point with an ARMED guard makes sense. And if that person needs to be a civilian volunteer, just like the ones who work in the library and many classrooms, where’s the harm? Even CT has hunters and lifelong gun owners who could do this type volunteering.

      Go ask ANY of the parents who lost a child if they’d NOW object to someone trained and armed standing in the hallway of ANY school.

      The funniest, not funny haha, thing o come out yet was some CT Assemblyjerk on ??? TV network today talking about tightening CT gun laws. This was after it was known who the shooter was and where his day started.

      I’m still not sure WHY armed teachers won’t work. That’s been said again and again. And I’ve yet to hear WHY that won’t work. Of course they need to be trained. As to the insurance angle, do you think the schools WON’T be in court NOW anyway?

      I like the idea of armed volunteers in uniform personally, but armed teachers would work too IMHO. They’d certainly work better with NO training than no one protecting the kids like today!

      1. Der:

        ” As to the insurance angle, do you think the schools WON’T be in court NOW anyway?”

        Actually no I don’t. School personnel are part of the lefty cabal. The left won’t allow such a suit because that might underscore the need for protection. And the lefty position is that protection isn’t needed if you just take away everyone’s guns.

    3. “how did this creep get into the school in the first place?”
      Just an educated guess at this point, but I expect he shot anyone who got in his way, and there was no armed response ready.

  10. It’s the government’s PRIMARY job to protect people from other governments. You left off the last three words.

    1. You may have a point there. I’ll have to think about that. For example, we have firemen which are part of the government protect us against fires. Policemen to protect us against criminals.

      Neither of those are governments.

    2. Firemen are a bad example; several places in the US still have non-government fire departments.

      Anyway, I figure the secondary job of the government is laws and enforcement, but that’s pretty much useless if the country is prone to outside invasion.

      If the purpose of the government is protect its citizens from everything, you get a “With Folded Hands” scenario, where nobody can do anything that the government suspects might potentially cause some harm. We’re way too far along that road now.

  11. This was a freak incident, plain and simple. There was no way to predict it or prevent it, sorry. And nothing will stop it from happening again.

    I like to look at the numbers and schools are still the safest places in America for kids to be. On average, 14 kids a day, die from intentional injuries, i.e. somebody killed them, nearly always outside the school environment. Another 37 a day die from unintentional injuries, mostly in motor vehicles.

    http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/images/CDC-childhoodinjury.pdf

  12. It doesn’t take a long time to unload 30 rounds using a couple of semi-auto 9mm pistols. Elementary graders don’t carry weapons. Teachers obviously don’t carry weapons into such a classroom. Even if there were a couple of armed people at the school it is quite unlikely they could have responded in time.

    1. I bet he took longer than you think and I bet he fired way more than 30 rounds.

      He wasn’t a trained shooter and doubt he was a very good shot.

      95% of the time with these bastards when they meet armed resistance, they off themselves on the spot.

      1. Actually they off themselves just before they meet armed resistance, in the form of police officers. F’n cowards, each and every one.

        1. Exactly Chris!

          Full credit to Tom Billing’s, who posted this is a more current thread:

          http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/12/daniel-zimmerman/clackamas-shooter-confronted-by-ccw-holder/

          So, this is why only 2 people died in such a mass of bodies fleeing the shooter, at Clackamas Town Center, in Oregon, where CCW is under shall issue rules. The Connecticut school could not even have had a CCW Holder visiting, IIRC.

          Note that the CCW Holder had a shot, and was seen by the gunman, but refused to fire, because there were fleeing people behind the shooter. Apparently, just seeing an armed citizen where he was not expecting any opposition was enough to turn the gunman from murdering people to suicide.

          Why?

          The same reason that so many of them committ suicide when cops show up.

          The conditions of easy prey have vanished for someone who thought himself a predator.

          Tom Billings

  13. Godzilla – Interesting comment from you. The Second Amendment was drafted at a time when a well-trained marksman could get off maybe three shots per minute; in the case of pistols, it was fairly common to carry two, so you’d get two shots off and that was your lot. Of course, everyone knew this, so the idea of swarming an amok shooter would have had much more traction in such a case than it does now.

    “If it’s criminal to have guns then only criminals will have guns.” Perhaps so, but where do the illegal guns come from?

    The main source of illegal guns is guns diverted from the US legal civilian gun market. If Americans didn’t have such a love affair with guns then there would be many fewer guns, legal or illegal – and the illegal ones would be many times more expensive. Or, possibly, much more dangerous to the user. Which also applies to illegal guns other than in the USA, and that’s why I’m interested in the issue. I’m British, so the idea of Americans shooting each other doesn’t really bother me much – but the possibility of being caught in the crossfire in a British city does.

    The same applies to ammunition. A home-made gun is useless without ammo, and without a legal gun market ammo is much more difficult to obtain, and if someone is capable of manufacturing guns, powder and shot from scratch then he almost deserves to be able to use them.

    1. Fletcher, there are likely hundreds of Billions of rounds of ammo in the continental US. There are over a Billion rounds of .22 Rimfire alone sold in the US annually. Frankly, I think the 300 Million firearms number is low and it is more like 500 Million. You can’t put the genie back into the bottle. By the time the criminal supply of firearms runs out, you will be able to print a gun and the tool to make the ammo.

      So, any proposal to restirct the supply is unserious or ill-informed.

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