.
There is good thinking I do because I have my model. For one thing I remember that the National Guard exists. I can take the time to look up its mission and find that it works for the department of Public Safety. There are 12,000 “soldiers”. Soldiers are mainly meant to kill your enemies so calling the National Guard personnel “soldiers” is not accurate. The military equipment they have is meant to be used to evacuate civilians from the harm of nature. Otherwise they are called out to protect property when the people get angry. When we become the threat to the peace they will kill us. That is why they have machine guns.
I’d prefer to call the National Guard Disaster Aid & Civil Defense Force.
The National Guard is an institution we pay for already & all ready trained to kill people with guns. For the protection of schools the use of this personnel, makes the most sense to me. The most matured system for protecting territories like schools is the system applied to airports. I think more of airport defense systems in countries like Denmark than I do of the TSA in the USA, but in the world there are systems for the defense of people at airports. Those ought be adopted for the schools.
I’d suggest that for the units of men & women charged with the mission of defending the schools put to the job by the National Guard and the Department of Public Safety a unique uniform. A uniform that makes the “soldiers” look smart & heroic is preferred. Since the role of the National Guard is to preserve Pubic Safety uniforms of organized death machines detract from youthful perceptions of National Guardsmen as helpful or heroic.
I am aware that there are youths drawn to an image of themselves in uniforms. Instead of wanting myself to wear a uniform that represented to me conformity, I developed my own uniform. People who are carrying guns & have a mission to stop killers in schools need to be identifiable. Teachers even who may be armed in the schools will inevitably be shot if they are not in a particular uniform. As form follows function the function requires a uniform.
We in the United States insist on reinventing the wheel too often. There is plenty of talk of Volunteer School Saviors. That is their motive and I would about rather they be in it for the money since the whole thing is dangerous. I am afraid of the George Zimmerman’s of the nation. George Zimmerman was motivated to be a heroic murderer. He was just a murderer far as I am concerned. Inevitably there will be people like George Zimmerman attracted to becoming school guards.
When I was in High School there were always these undercover cops looking to arrest us for selling or smoking pot. It is a phenomena of the US lifestyle policing that SRO officers, “School Resource Officers” now in our schools arresting students. The socialization process for the civilizing of youth that is a facet of going to school and learning important skills is ruptured by the perceived mission of the School Resource Officer (Corp?).
To expect from children and adolescents adult behavior is stupid.
I told my daughter that she had a right to her secrets. Everyone has a right to some secrets because otherwise they do not get an opportunity to be the person they really want to be. We are prone to making the most mistakes when your are young & really don’t know better. I pity those defined by their mistakes.
Parents & Teachers are often united in the perception of students as at school to become skilled AND socialized.
Yes, the “Bad Seed” exists. The play “The Bad Seed” is about a little girl who likes to kill other kids and gets away with it because of the assumption of innocence afforded little girls. I am hearing in my mind the Chevalier song “Thank God for little girls.” She was just born bad.
The report from my friend who drove a cab in NYC, along with my own observations were that those who used crack as a pack of young boys were more vicious than juvenile delinquents of “Rebel Without A Cause” era gangs. “Simple theives were always around robbing cab drivers of their cash, but once there was crack they would shoot you in the back of the head and then rob you.”
In the real world it had been unusual for cab drivers to be murdered. After crack the story of the murder & robbery of a cab driver was so common the papers stopped reporting on it as that much of a newsworthy event. There are the unsocialized and then there are the criminally insane, and then there are gangs and lone wolves. What some people see as warnings others see as instructions.
It has become necessary in the United States that our schools be defended from mass murderers. These young mass murderers are produced by aspects of our society, culture & desires. I simply do not fully understand what motivates young mass murders. Originally I believed that because in our society the most valuable thing to have is fame, and mass murderers become famous, that the motive was fame.
The hero? There will always be those who see criminals as the heroes. These people can get fast firing military style rifles. If they lived in the outback of Australia they would go out and shoot kangaroos. If they were American Boy Scouts they could shoot targets at the camp rifle range. Young unsocialized isolated untalented youths with no potential for meritocratic fame in urban settings, urban environments, go out & shoot up people in our schools so often it is a public safety emergency.
I would also say that for the defense of the typical school you need to have enough defenders. For the typical school I estimate a minimum of 5 to be the number. Think of it as would a General when they man the lines of a front. Not enough people, your soldiers on the line & the line can be broken and your army out flanked and encircled.
The saying in film was “It takes what it takes & costs what it costs.”
For now I’ll leave it at that. When determining the fastest way to provide the personnel “Trained” I looked around and remembered the Bond, that Education Bond of North Carolina’s that was to pay for Educational Institution buildings & the National Guard. We already pay them and train them and it wouldn’t hurt them to have a consistent job to do as opposed to waiting for disasters. It wouldn’t hurt for them to have a day in and day out involvement in territories all over the state. The more they are seen as heroes hanging around the more heroes will be made from those who do not have very good heroes.
So there.
P.S. I highly recommend the book “You Can’t Win” by Jack Black. It is a story from a man who became a professional criminal, and why he became such a person. Eventually the man did change & become an upstanding citizen, but it took a long time.
