fstar, there was an armed guard -- a sheriff deputy -- at Parkland. he was a kitty though, thinking about how he's so close to retirement and too old for this shit
i understand the want to have security ready to react quickly. i understand how "wasteful" it would be to spend that money on security (i guess our children aren't our future).
i also understand a culture that is so f**k paranoid about crime occurring that they pack heat. conceal carry, not because they are transporting diamonds and they are worried about a gang of thieves planning for months a heist coming to get the case, but because they are going to arbys. so of course its a natural thought that we should protect the innocent with weapons much as we protect our own from scum when they are with us and we venture out on a walmart run
outside of terrorists and insane people there is no one that wants to hurt children at a school. these are the people we must protect against. we have a massive listening apparatus set up to process data from around the world to stop terrorism and check out your nudes. but the mental health part? its a subset of the large question of providing for health of the citizens. i addressed it directly in the first post, saying that government should be able to stop you from buying weapons. we allow government to put people in involuntary holds for their own safety, we should allow government to remove from people the tools that they could use to cause others harm. this of course can be abused, i am aware. so can the NSA. we have courts though, and all of this would be open knowledge. that's part of the point, so when trying to buy a gun we can stop crazy people from getting them
also in regards to this being the only country with people with mental problems that go and shoot a lot of people -- the worst mass shooting happened in Norway. the perpetrator is a delusional right winger. there he has successful argued that only having a PS2 in his multi room "prison" "cell" is "torture" and has been given modern systems to play video games all day. there is a place where they provide for the physical and mental health of their citizens. even there, this stuff still happens. so i don't think we can actually stop it forever no matter what we do. but before we go to arming teachers, we should probably think about all the people who accidentally die from firearms each year, and how now, even though you are a competent gun owner and lock everything up, your child can now kill themselves accidentally because you send them to a place that has guns all over it
i think a straight up ban is a non-starter. we should look at why the AR is the seemingly weapon of choice. 1, the media calls everything "AR" because they think it stands for "Assault Rifle" and is scary and they don't do their jobs and actually investigate anything or report the truth and 2, because it's so damn cheap and so damn easy to use. it's so fun to shoot, and if you haven't you really should. it's got basically no recoil. it's got a button to easy change magazine. it's just one trigger pull away from inflicting damage. and the small caliber bullets are deadly at close range as they have a lot of speed. so what do we do? i already talked about it. we need background checks, we need to register semiautomatics, and we need to have tax stamps on magazines, among other smaller initiatives.