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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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entered the Covenant School via a side door

Once again, actually locking doors seems to be the anti-mass shooting low-hanging fruit

The doors were locked. The perp shot out the glass.

Ah - so then hardening the doors would be the fruit but that is substantially less low hanging.

There's glass that's harder to destroy, but the real low-hanging fruit is giving guns and training to teachers.

Doesn't the US military have loads and loads of old 9mm pistols hanging around ? Ditto for ammo and magazines.

Vastly cheaper, plus, it's not like they have anywhere to run in a school, etc.

Doesn't the US military have loads and loads of old 9mm pistols hanging around ?

No one should want that old inventory.

I mean, is all of the vast pistol inventory that used up ?

Dunno; I'd imagine that, even with how mistreated many acutal military-service M9s may be, it's probably not improbable to refurbish them with spare parts and some TLC post-service. The Beretta 92 overall is still kind of in that "refuses to die" phase, especially since the adoption of the M17/M18 wasn't that long ago.

From the footage released, the shooter did not shoot the lock. Instead, the doors had glass panels, which were shot out and easily traversed through.

Then it makes total sense. Shooting out the lock only reliably works with a shotgun from what I've seen.

I know I know, ">Amerishoots," but when I was in school, every time we had lockdown drills someone would always point out, "couldn't the bad guys just shoot their way through the door?" and the teachers would have to begrudgingly admit that yes, they could do that and that we were pretty much wasting our time.

The proper response to an actual school shooting is to run the f*** out of the school building as soon as possible.

This is of course enormously inconvenient to administrators running a drill, and so they don't do it.

All of the active shooter training I've seen at the university and corporate level emphasizes "run, hide, fight" (in order). Admittedly, I think K-12 does still emphasize locking doors and emptying hallways, but they have invested in better doors and access control in the last decade.

It is the proper response to a guy hiding on the property with a gun after robbing a liquor store, which is when it wasn't a drill for me.

At a small high school where I used to work, this is literally what they said. They did not have drills. It seemed very sensible.

It's not such a good plan at a large elementary school, though.

This will double the cost of all contractor work on public schools. It’s also a massive pain in the ass.

I have never seen a school that had doors that weren't locked from the outside after school hours. The problem seems to be actually locking them, not that they can't be locked

I think this means that if you are doing work that requires you to alternate between inside and outside, you will now need to funnel yourself back through the main entrance rather than go back in the door you came out of.

Though really they should just put card readers on every door. It's a safety issue the other direction as well. Imagine a teacher gets locked out and can't reach a child in distress, for any reason.

https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i14.pdf

An estimated 4,000 school building fires were reported by United States fire departments each year

Optimizing for relatively rare events at the cost of more commonplace ones is bad policy.

Is it really possible that you are not familiar with door push bars, standardly installed on just about every institutional door I've ever seen?

"Locking doors" in this case really only requires that the door not open from the outside. A crash bar (and possibly an alarm system) wouldn't prevent safe egress in a fire, but prevents random entry.

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