The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
The Psychology Of Force
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, something that a recent poster was arguing made me reflect on something that I've been ruminating on.
For the past year, I've been studying Chinese boxing, both for conditioning and for self-defense. As part of the self-defense aspect, there's been discussion of the psychology of a self-defense situation, especially the mindset the defender needs to take to be effective. The main issue is that most people aren't conditioned mentally to cause harm, even if they may be physically capable of doing so.
There's an argument that is put forth that school shootings could be solved by arming the teachers, so they might "fight back". The problem with that, however, is that the gun is a very minor aspect of enabling someone to "fight back" - without the conditioning, the weapon is a tool which the wielder has no ability to use. The US military spends significant money and time to condition recruits to have the ability to pull the trigger psychologically, and even that is limited - the explosion in PTSD has been attributed in part to this conditioning failing to a degree, leaving the shooter unprepared for the mental trauma.
Too many people look only at physical capability in determining combat capability. What makes criminals dangerous is not their ability to use force, but their willingness.
For the past year, I've been studying Chinese boxing, both for conditioning and for self-defense. As part of the self-defense aspect, there's been discussion of the psychology of a self-defense situation, especially the mindset the defender needs to take to be effective. The main issue is that most people aren't conditioned mentally to cause harm, even if they may be physically capable of doing so.
There's an argument that is put forth that school shootings could be solved by arming the teachers, so they might "fight back". The problem with that, however, is that the gun is a very minor aspect of enabling someone to "fight back" - without the conditioning, the weapon is a tool which the wielder has no ability to use. The US military spends significant money and time to condition recruits to have the ability to pull the trigger psychologically, and even that is limited - the explosion in PTSD has been attributed in part to this conditioning failing to a degree, leaving the shooter unprepared for the mental trauma.
Too many people look only at physical capability in determining combat capability. What makes criminals dangerous is not their ability to use force, but their willingness.
XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
+5
Posts
Basically, I disagree with the assertion that a weapon, even with training, alone allows a person to fight. Much more important is the psychological state of the person. It's not enough to arm people, and even to train them - you have to condition them, make them able to consider the use of force mentally. And even then, it only works somewhat.
In short, it's not the tool that makes someone dangerous - it's the will to use it.
Far as I know not even the police receive this kind of training (though SWAT/Armed police in the UK might be an exception), and soldiers do not make good policemen. Getting teachers to 'other' their charges to the extent that they are confident they could kill one seems like a terrible idea. Not to mention the other cornerstone of good gun ownership is keeping your weapons secure so that others can't get to them - seems like that's a hell of a challenge in a school situation when by design the rational adults are in the vast minority, and legal action against the people who would steal and use them (for whatever reason) is complicated due to them being minors.
If you are taking precautions to prevent misuse, then you're talking about having a school armoury (which to be fair, my school actually did for entirely different reasons). And then you're now talking about a case of response times - how significant is the extra period of time that it takes for the police to arrive on scene compared to the risks in teachers having to get to the armoury, arm themselves and then return to their classes in the case of an emergency?
Belief in a thing does not make that thing true.
Fair enough, but it doesn't make it false, either. I've listed 3 other reasons that would militate towards those teachers' beliefs being valid - one of those, the fact that a number of the teachers are ex police or military - was given by Hedgie as satisfying his criteria in the OP. Would you or Hedgie care to tackle those?
Hedgie (and you, apparently) posit they do not have the wherewithal (and perhaps cannot) without more, you're making the claim, now prove it.
I agree with Hedgie' s broad conclusion that, in terms of self defense, the mental fortitude to use a weapon is a prerequisite of using it. Sure. Prove to me why teachers cannot be possessed of that.
If military experiences are going to be compared with civilian ones we need to excise the mental image of a firefight from the conversation. They're too chaotic for much outside of act and react. In that case your training is just there to fall back on.
Instead consider the situation of a post being approached by an armed individual. You go through a Salute report to identify numbers, uniforms, armament, ect. You don't sit there thinking about what they had for breakfast or what they did yesterday when you saw them.
However, a teacher, even when given the same training, would still be forced to consider that. The popular mental exercise for this kind of thing is to imagine what would happen if confronted with a gunman. It does not consider what would happen if you were confronted with Jimmy, the kid you talked to last week, who now has a gun and blood splatter on his shoes.
You cannot be a functional human being and willingly stand in front of a class of kids while thinking "which child would I be willing to pull the trigger on if they confronted me?" Because, make no mistake, that's what we're talking about. Having teachers, even willingly, carrying firearms is going to force everyone to think about that. I'd much rather they got better funding to do their classes and to fund stress management and counciling programs.
Barring someone coming up with actual studies or stats on the issue, I don't think either claim is terribly uncontroversial on its face.
I think this is important. We could train teachers to be security. But we'd run a huge risk of making them less effective teachers.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
1) all of the proposals I've seen involving arming teachers involve teachers who already have CPLs bringing their weapon to their classroom and securing it in their desk or cabinets with a special lockbox. Other faculty outside of certain administrators, and students would not know. There has been no suggestion for a school armory.
2) there is no governmental check to see if someone apply for their CPL has the mental fortitude to using it in defense. Why should that even be required? You maybe might bring it up in a policy debate about the merits of guns for defense in schools in general, but that doesn't appear to be what were doing here. Assuming the policy passes for other reasons, you would deny it in the grounds that "some of you might not be able to, therefore none of you should be allowed to try?"
3) the outside threat is not always a current student. See: Adam Lanza.
I'm not a teacher. I don't think you are either. Neither of us can speak to this, but you're making the claim. Do you have proof of this assertion? I don't see it the way you do.
I'm not seeing this; in fact, I'm seeing a statement that the military has failed to adequately prepare people.
I think it's far better to assume that people should not be trusted to use firearms around children in highly stressful situations until it's been shown that they can.
I don't think anyone has said that they cannot be possessed of that and/or trained properly.
Which doesn't mean that I wouldn't oppose arming teachers for other reasons up to and including my gut reaction to the idea being wat.
The other problem here is that, even if you have another guy with a gun, that doesn't mean the guy with the gun will be accurate in that scenario. Friendly fire is extremely likely in this scenario, especially as most school shootings are done by students and most people in a school are students. Schools are also typically crowded rooms with relatively thin walls (cheap construction) and strong design for economy of space, making the likelihood of a miss hitting someone pretty high.
There is also the possibility that since there are multiple guns on campus that the likelihood grows that a student will take one of these guns to perform the shooting, as they will be available and typically most teachers will not be policing them as perfectly as police or other trained military or security professionals.
You're beginning with the belief that I think the CPL system isn't a complete joke.
It is.
The CPL is, quite often, a weekend class. The judgement that someone is fit mentally, physically, or skillwise to carry a deadly weapon should never be considered something that you can figure out between mowing the lawn and hitting the bar.
Because a gun is a deadly weapon. If you produce a deadly weapon that is legal grounds for an officer of the law to use lethal force to stop you. There's nothing a teacher should be allowed to do in a school that would allow an officer of the law to legally kill said teacher. Likewise there is no point where a teacher, in their duties as a teacher, should be allowed to legally take upon themselves the rights of an officer of the law.
Why should a test for mental fortitude be required? Because we're talking about situations where if you fail to grasp or handle the situation correctly, someone innocent will die, but if you adequately prepare teachers to know how to escape and be able to escape, then they can save many more lives.
They are the adults in the situation, and it is more important for them to provide direction and guidance for children than to leave them behind to try and play John McClane.
Yes. I would deny it based on the fact that none of them are required to prove that they are capable of handling the situation the law is intended to counter. You do not get a weapon in the military if you cannot qualify for it.
Doesn't matter. The major source of the threat is within the student body and the faculty. The outliers do not negate this fact.
That's pretty disingenuous. OP takes teachers as some kind of homogenous group who would be issued guns together, as opposed to individual teachers already in possession of CPLs who don't want to be stripped of their right to self defense or defense of others at the schoolhouse gate.
Edit: back after 5:00.
I am a teacher. My purpose is to educate and support my students. Not defend them. Expecting that as part of my meager US educator salary is not only ridiculous as a matter of principle but doing so with any degree of success in the modern school environment would be next to impossible without rebuilding every school for defense.
Teaching is a highly stressful job, and it isn't uncommon for teachers to go off on students physically (and then be fired for it) when the stress gets too high. Look at any high school or college in the country, you will find someone terminated from employment for physical altercations with students within the last five years. A teacher with a gun in this scenario would be increasing the risk to students, not lowering it.
You have these long, straight hallways with small classrooms that hold about 20-50 students (depending on the school and grade level). Classrooms typically has a semi-fortified door with a small access window, but no other exits. They also tend to have large numbers of un-openable windows where possible for natural light. Teachers are almost always assigned a room and stay there in the US classroom (this changes at the University level, but K-12 where most of these discussions are occurring tend to have teacher-specific rooms in the US). Students mill about for 10-15 minutes from class to class throughout the day in the long hallways. This is where most shootings start.
Imagine a teacher stepping out into that hallway with his gun, aiming at a student with another gun, shooting, and somehow hitting ONLY that student and not the hundreds of chaotically fleeing people throughout the school.
The myth of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun is rooted in some sort of western dual mentality. Reality is the teacher would likely shoot at that student, miss several times, kill a bystander, and maybe (if lucky) hit the right student with a considerable amount of collateral damage.
To prove this otherwise: find me a case of a good average guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun through a gunfire exchange in a crowded area that didn't result in collateral damage. Even with the police this is extremely rare.
Regardless, even if we change the discussion from should all teachers be armed to should individual teachers be allowed to be armed, claiming that we should assume the answer to be yes until proven otherwise seems... dangerous.
What confuses me is that the political Right tends to argue both
It seems strange that you would trust someone to carry a gun around your child, but not trust them to teach science to your child.
There's two kinds of teachers, in that narrative. There are The Right Kind of Teachers, who are God-fearing, good-hearted folk who teach "the right things" to kids and would defend the childrens with their lives and don't teach them there dang ole "evolution" as an exclusive fact. Then there's The Other Kind of Teachers, them there corrupting sort who are filling our innocent children with those ideas that they shouldn't be learning and not focusing on the fundamentals like when I was a boy.
The kind of people pushing armed teachers as an idea believe in the former being armed, but not the latter. Of course, they also see the latter as gun-hating pansies anyway, so that's of minimal concern to them.
It might be worth noting that the groups expressing these two concepts may have overlap but not so much as you would expect from Fox News.
Do me a favor then and steer the conversation whike I finish out the workday from what some trolled spammed on these boards today before he got banned to the actual policy considerations that are being considered and enacted.
It's frustrating playing bad guy on this liberal board, but that's okay. However, I'm not inclined to participate if I'm defending the strawman you're intent on knocking over.
Incredibly, I voted for Obama both terms and yet I'm advocating for teachers being able to defend their classrooms.
My god, it's like it's it's not just a group of blandly evil, homogeneous Republican Others who want "guns in them schools."
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_shooting
Depending on which account you believe. Regardless, the possibility exists, and somehow they managed not to shoot a crowd of students in friendly fire like I keep hearing posited.
If you didn't want to take part in the debate, no one was forcing you. You keep asking for a level of evidence you are not yourself providing to back your own claims.
If you want to play wounded hero, this probably isn't the place.
Here's the point you're missing - the advantage a school shooter (or any criminal willing to go far enough) has is not the weapon they wield.
It's that they are willing to kill. And in some cases, that they are willing to kill with little thought. And that is a massive difference. That is an edge that you can't make go away, at least in a manner that is at all healthy.
I'm not bringing the initial claims, and Hedgie and others aren't shy about asking for that level of evidence when people opposed to thejr position are positing claims in different threads.
Edit: I'll exit the thread, I can't spend this amount of time replying to half a dozen people when I'm the only dissenting voice.
Pragmatically, out of the 80,000,000 primary, secondary, and post-secondary students in the United States and the four million teachers, I find it almost certain there will be more students killed in accidental shootings, suicides, and intentional homicides that wouldn't have died except for the presence of a gun than the ten or so lives saved per year.
You're talking .0125:100,000 deaths from school shootings...the general homicide rate is roughly 5:100,000 and suicide is 10:100,000, and that's assuming students are at normal risk (they are above average).
Do note that the students were also trained sworn law enforcement officers and military personnel.
This seems like a poor example; ya got eyewitnesses to the second account, which goes that the bad guy put his gun down and then brawled an unarmed guy, before the other 2 with guns showed up. Said 2 guys are the only ones who seem to push the version where guns helped alleviate the situation. The article notes media bias against defensive use of guns, but it seems more like. Y'know. It happened the other way. :P
Theres another case here, which actually happens and I feel is ignored: an armed trained individual decides he can not take a clean shot, and instead fosters evacuation instead. An armed person doesnt mean reckless action taken. I don't think you were specifically proposing this will always be the action of someone with a firearm, and I am not trying to straw man, but this is an argument that actually comes up.
At one of the recent mall shootings, a bystander came forward later as armed, but stated there was no way to shoot the assailant without risking hitting anyone else, so he didnt and left instead.
I would state that in reality a teacher wouldnt fire at all(part of training to assess, part of not wanting the responsibility of shooting a child). Through different pressures and expectations they could be given training or step up for training anyways without ever wanting to use it.
I honestly don't see a realistic situation where a teacher would have the ability to have a situation where it would be advisable to fire on an assailant.
Preparing people to commit acts of violence requires creating in-group and out-group identification that reduces inter-group empathy and altruism. The diligence required to identify individuals as threats and swiftly respond to them with violence is poorly-compatible with the empathy required to relate to students. There's a reason police and military tend to be less empathetic, and it's not just because of self-selection.
In much the same way that teachers aren't homogenous, not all of the pro- positions are homogenous.
Yes, some individuals are simply CCW-holders who want to carry their permitted weapon onto campus.
In other cases, the school district is sending teachers to private firearms training, in some cases the companies who profit off of this training are the same people agitating for these programs.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Most schools of any size (at least in my state) have a campus-assigned police officer. This should be sufficient for any degree of armament that the school needs and (in my opinion) is a more reasonable line of inquiry on expanding defense of a school. If the goal is to keep the peace, having more police officers assigned to school locations would likely do that job better than untrained civilians.
This is, to me, an incredibly insane idea.
That's sort of the point of this thread. The US has a bit of a problem with how we've mythologized firearms (the "lone sharpshooter", all the stuff around the Peacemaker, etc.) This tends to blind us to what a weapon truly is - a tool.
In my opinion, once they cross that line, once they've shown the willingness to engage and kill (you always aim to kill, aiming to maim is even more dangerous) a student or any individual that hasn't development completely mentally or physically at a school campus, they're value as an educator has gone to 0. It's an attribution of 'suspect' or 'threat' identifier to a child that forever slants and jades their judgment when engaging with students and as an educator, they should not have that responsibility or purview. It's student first and only, and a teachers responsibility is to those students under their watch. Suspect or threat identification should come from law enforcement members, not teachers.
It's completely out of the realm of education and their role as educators.
I also believe schools should be a gun free zone. If there is an active shooter on the campus, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to identify whom the individual is if it's only that person(s). Also, it's incredibly safer, as we wouldn't have a shoot out between educators and shooters while law enforcement are either enroute, arrriving, or on the scene. All an armed teacher does is get in the way of the process. Unless you're incredibly lucky and only kill/hurt the bad guy every single time with 100% guarantee, get out of the way and fulfill your role as an educator and help facilitate the orderly evacuation of all the students from the campus and let the law enforcement deal with it. More lives will be saved and many more will be at less risk.
Most police are about as likely to have a accidental discharge as shoot at a criminal and about as likely to shoot themselves as be shot by a criminal.
So add being less trained and much less likely to use a firearm and that's what you get arming teachers.
I swear I've read an article about school armories, i.e. m16s/body armour.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious