Contributors

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

This Is What Happens When You Put Guns in Schools

One of the keystones in the NRA/Republican reaction to mass shootings is the delusion that more guns make us safer. This is what happens when you put guns in schools:
A teacher who is also a reserve police officer trained in firearm use accidentally discharged a gun Tuesday at Seaside High School in Monterey County, Calif., during a class devoted to public safety. A male student was reported to have sustained non-life-threatening injuries.
Apparently the student was struck in the neck by some kind of shrapnel when the teacher fired the weapon into the ceiling, making sure that the gun wasn't loaded.

What an idiot! If he'd been at home he could have shot his own child sleeping in the bed upstairs.

You never, ever, ever pull the trigger to make sure a gun is unloaded. To do that, you unload the weapon! For a semi-automatic you remove the magazine, pull back the slide and check for a round in the chamber. If you do this wrong you can shoot yourself, like this ATF agent.

For double-action revolvers you swing out the cylinder and push the extractor rod to force the rounds out. Unloading a single-action revolver (a 170-year-old design that requires pulling back the hammer for each shot) is more complicated and more error-prone, and involves pushing each round out separately. To make matters worse, most revolvers don't have safeties.

The teacher did not have clearance to have a weapon on campus. What the hell was this clown thinking?
Exactly why the teacher was displaying the weapon at all was not entirely clear. Police said he was “providing instruction related to public safety.”

The father told KSBW that the teacher was preparing to use the gun to show how to disarm someone.
Why would anyone in their right mind use a real gun loaded with real rounds for a demonstration? A bright orange plastic water pistol would do the job. If more realism is required, an air gun with the same look and heft would be far safer -- though as we all know from The Christmas Story, you can still shoot your eye out. Or use a decommissioned gun with a plugged barrel.

Most guns are seriously defective products with antiquated design flaws.
This incident points out a major design flaw in firearms design: you can't tell when they're loaded. Guns are not only inherently dangerous, they're seriously defective products with antiquated design flaws that magnify that danger.

Pretty much every product -- from cars, to computers, to microwave ovens, to chainsaws -- has some sort of indicator to show that it is turned on. But not guns.

When you pick up a gun, you have no idea whether it'll go off. Many guns have safeties, but if the safety's off, there's generally no way to tell by looking at a gun whether there's a round in the chamber. For this reason, every single day across the country there are dozens if not hundreds of accidental firearms discharges, even among seasoned professionals like cops and firearms instructors.

Most guns were designed more than a century ago (even modern semiautomatic handguns are clones of the Colt 1911). If there are going to be guns in schools, they should be designed with safety first and foremost. Such guns should have an easily visible indicator of a chambered round and a display for the number of shots remaining in the magazine.

Furthermore, guns in schools should be limited to firing only for authorized personnel ("smart guns"). This would prevent students and perpetrators from stealing and using them.

Almost 500 people were killed in accidental shootings in 2015, and thousands more were injured. The exact number of non-fatal injuries isn't really known, because those statistics aren't tracked -- intentionally, by Congressional order. But they result in billions of dollars of lost wages, as well as health care and funeral expenses.

The NRA has resisted the very idea of smart guns for years. I don't know exactly why: their backers, the firearms industry, would stand to profit handsomely if they could get every gun owner to melt down their old weapons and replace them with safer modern firearms.

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