This is what passes for journalism these days USA Today: “132 hours to train teachers on guns: Is it enough?”
A proposal to arm teachers, administrators and school staff in Florida causes widespread concern about the minimal firearms training they would get — 132 hours — less than that of basic police recruits…
Because the idea is not to be cops but to shoot a killer in the face repeatedly and accurately. The bill even says it: Teachers have no arrest powers nor they can be law enforcement duties. But apparently Greg Toppo, the author of this assortment of idiotic thoughts could not bother himself with reading the proposed law.
The training is modeled after a course developed by Polk County, Fla., Sheriff Grady Judd, who told lawmakers last month that the average response time for police in active-shooter incidents is five minutes.
Sheriff Grady Judd is hated by the Florida Liberals. He is a no-nonsense LEO who has no problems doing what is right and damn the bad press.
Authorities said the Parkland shooting was over in three minutes.
Hiding behind cars and edifications while “setting a perimeter” is not what anybody would call a “response.”
“911 does not work when there is an active shooter,” Judd said.
True dat. Calling 911 does not make cops appear magically,
Under the proposed law, schools could use state funding to hire school resource officers (SROs) or police —
Which is the reason most Chief of Police do not want teachers armed. They are creaming their little uniform pants at the idea they can lay their hands on a piece of that almost half a billion dollars of pork of the Guardian program.
or train gun-toting “school guardians.”
Do I detect a bias against arming teachers and school personnel?
Among the training school guardians would be required to complete:
80 hours of firearms instruction, requiring an 85% pass rate on the final exam.
16 hours of instruction in precision pistol shooting.
8 hours of shooting instruction using state-of-the-art simulators.
8 hours of instruction in active-shooter or assailant scenarios.
Jesus, I have to say that is overkill and then some. I can have a newbie shooter with six to ten IDPA matches under his or her belt outshoot 99% of the rank and file cop from any department and probably embarrass the crap out of their SWAT teams too. And no, I am not blowing unicorn bubbles up your ass, it has happened more times than you can imagine.
Applicants must pass a psychological evaluation and drug test (as well as subsequent random drug tests) and commit to ongoing training, weapon inspections and annual firearm qualification.
You guys love your shrinks, OK fine. Annual quals? How about every quarter to make sure they do not lose their skills? Send them to competitive shooting matches, plenty of those every month in Florida.
Basic police recruits must do more to carry a gun, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
They must complete an 80-hour course in defensive tactics and another 80 hours in firearms. They must show proficiency in 41 “defensive tactics” techniques and understand the legal application of the use of deadly force. They must know how to handle handguns, shotguns, rifles and semiautomatic weapons — and they must practice, among other skills, survival shooting techniques.
Yo Mr. Toppo, if the teachers are just going to carry a sidearm, they won’t be needing the shotgun or rifle instruction, would they? And as for “defensive tactics” I know that covering the difference of concealment versus cover, slicing the pie and a few other items is all they need and again, it can be taught in a couple of IDPA matches. And as for the “legal application of the use of deadly force” that is quite simple: You see bad guy shooting kids, shooting in the face till he stops. You are allowed by the State of Florida to use Deadly force to stop a Forcible Felony and shooting kids clearly is one.
Curt Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council and a former SRO in Broward County, Fla., where the Parkland shooting took place, said 132 hours is not nearly enough to entrust educators with guns.
I forgot. Teachers are low-level, barely functional humans that cannot operate simple mechanical devices while in school property. How come we allow them to educate kids is a mystery.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous to think that in 132 hours of training, you’re going to be prepared to take on a well-armed gunman who comes onto a campus to kill children,” he said.
Richard Myers, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 75 big-city police forces in the USA and Canada, said he has discussed arming teachers with many of the group’s members. “I’ve yet to hear a police chief think that’s a good idea,” he said.
Two things: Sheriff Grady Judd is a Chief LEO so you are full of it and second, see the above comment related to pork.
Myers said cops aren’t trained just to use firearms but to know when not to use them. “It’s not just about shooting holes in targets,” he said. “It’s about de-escalation. It’s about ‘Shoot, don’t shoot.’ “
Hmmm… lemme think: Bad guy is inside the school with a rifle and shooting at kids, should I shoot him or should I try to de-escalate the situation by maybe singing lullabies? offering him pudding? reading him a bedtime story? Is this jackass for real?
He worries that armed teachers could themselves become targets of police when law enforcement responds to an active school shooter. “I see some real crises in the making,” Myers said.
And now cops are too effing dumb to differentiate between the guy shooting at students and the guy or gal shooting at the guy shooting the students. How do plainclothes detectives even make it out of the precinct without being shot by uniformed cops ?
Lavarello, the former SRO, agreed: “I would not want to be the officer dispatched to a school and being told over the radio that we have one ‘bad’ armed person and 25 ‘good’ armed people.
If the ratio is one bad guy versus twenty-five good guys, the dispatched officer will arrive to see a very perforated body of somebody who chose the wrong school. Is he making shit up as he goes?
The problem is we’re truly going to be setting up an ‘O.K. Corral’ scenario. I’d rather have the officers that we know who can address the situation.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but the OK Corral happened near a corral, not a school (what gave it away?) and was not an active shooter situation. But mentioning the OK Corral does make for good copy, doesn’t it?
Lavarello said arming teachers with so little training presents other problems: “The reality of it is, they still have a gun, and what they deem extreme on a campus is going to vary across the scale. A very bad fight, maybe with a kid with a knife, could trigger an extreme reaction to someone who’s not well-versed in the training.”
OK, this guy is an idiot. Only a high-grade imbecile will say that somebody using a knife as a weapon is not a threat that may require deadly force. One question, what do cops do when facing a man attacking somebody or them with a knife? They shoot his ass dead.
Joanne McCall, president of the Florida Education Association (FEA), said the union discourages schools from participating. “I don’t believe that’s what we should be doing,” she said. “We should be providing the funds to provide resource officers in every school.”
Yes, we already know most school boards will not allow the program to be implemented. Hell, 17 dead kids made the state pony over 600 million dollars. Dead kids are good business for school boards!
The union hand-delivered a letter to Scott this week, asking him to veto the “guardians” section of the bill, she said.
Too late, the weak-ass signed the bill into law already.
McCall noted that several of the state’s largest districts — including Broward County — said they’d opt out of the “guardians” program. The bill would otherwise provide $97 million for SROs — the FEA calculated that it would take about $115 million to put an SRO in every school that needs one.
Ding-ding-ding! come get your pork!
A recent survey of teachers and school staff statewide found that about 70% don’t want to arm school employees. “We are trained to be educators,” McCall said. “We are not trained to handle those kinds of situations. Having a concealed weapon and shooting at target practice is different than those intense moments when you have an active shooter.”
I wonder how they were able to be trained to drive a car or operate an electric can opener without collapsing into a heap of nervous breakdown. It is good to know that at least 30% of teachers and school staff thought being armed is a good idea but unfortunately they will be forced by the school board to remain potential victims.
There is money in corpses as all of you can see.
And we are the blood thirsty ones.
132 hours? You can learn how to design a particle accelerator in less time.
Or a rocket. Or an accelerator to be launched on a rocket. Well, maybe you need an extra 5 or 6 hours for the combo. But still.
Personally, I’d argue that NRA Basic should be sufficient. That doesn’t teach all (or even most) of the skills that are useful for this setting. But it is about all you need not to be a danger to bystanders and be able to make a somewhat positive contribution. For a requirement, that’s all that should be demanded. (Obviously, doing more is good and should be encouraged, arguably by reimbursing teachers who want more training.)
132 hours is 16 1/2 days. That’s enough time to take a good number of courses at Gunsight or Rangemaster.
What we are seeing here is another case of the Initial Cost Fallacy. This is where you shoot down a project you don’t like by lumping every possible cost together to make things look prohibitively expensive.
The NRA personnal protection in the home course is 8 hours. This qualifys you for a ccw in Maine. The NRA personal protection outside the home is 14 hours-2 in class 12 on the range and you shoot 600 rounds we do it in 2 days usually saturday and following saturday. Thats 22 hours total!! Idiots as usual harping about what they know nothing of.
These requirements aren’t there to ensure that the teachers are properly trained. They’re not cops, they’re not SROs – the gun would be used in only one circumstance – an active shooter. In most cases, the training should be fairly simple, but thorough: be competent with how your firearm works, and know how to operate it completely. Know how to use the sights and hit a target and practice it until it’s automatic. Develop a carry method that works for your circumstances. And get on with your life.
Should a shooter arrive, should the unthinkable happen, look for a funnel. Schools are full of doors, hallways, and “fatal funnels.” Use them.
If I’m a teacher, my first responsibility is my classroom. If the shooter is close, put the kids behind any barricade you’ve got, set up on the door, and wait for it to open. You don’t have to be particularly tactical – you don’t have to guard your “six,” or worry about your flank. You only have to guard that door. That is where the threat is going to come. At that point, you actually have a bit of a tactical advantage – take it.
If the shooter is in another part of the school, and you wish to go and engage, then further tactics might be important. But that’s not most teachers. I’m not asking teachers to go out and engage the shooter. I’m asking schools to give the teachers the ability to defend themselves and their students, in their own classroom, should it be necessary.
As I said, these requirements aren’t there to make sure the teachers are properly trained. They are there for the same reasons the left floats out stuff like confusing gun laws, “insurance” proposals, etc.: The goal is to make arming teachers so difficult and costly that no one will want to do it – and then they’ll point to the lack of participation as evidence it doesn’t work.
Or. You can drive a 2 ton car around some streets for 15 minutes parallel park and get a drivers license to legally DRIVE on the street…
With the liberal statists (but I repeat myself) a two year associate degree in Law Enforcement wouldn’t be enough because they’re teachers not cops. Of course the same people will s**t their pants if an uniformed cop goes into a restaurant to order lunch and happens to sit next to them.
They keep harping on that 132 hours of training.
I’ve been say that is way too much since that was added to the bill.
I’ve tried looking up the training listed, the only one I found so far is the first 80 hour CJK0040 course.
With the description of:
“Students experience safe weapon handling, the identification of weapons parts and ammunition, weapons cleaning and maintenance, handgun drawing and holstering, weapon loading and unloading, basic shooting principles, proficiency on the CJSTC basic firearms courses of firing with a handgun (revolver or semiautomatic pistol) during daylight and nighttime, and firing a long gun (shotgun or semiautomatic rifle/carbine) during daylight, proficiency for weapon handling, proper intervention for weapon malfunctions, and knowledge of survival shooting techniques.”
What the hell does that have to do with waiting in your classroom with the door blocked for the bad guy to break in so you can shoot him in the face?
The training requirement is there to make it as difficult as possible for most people to not want to bother with. Nothing else. Just like the pilot firearms training requirement. Just like ANY gun training requirement. It’s an impediment.
You are 100% right. In Illinois Democrats demanded the training required for a CCW be as long as possible so that people couldn’t get permits. They negotiated DOWN to 16 hours. The whole point was to make working class people unable to get a permit because the training was too long and expensive for them.
I knew a retired teacher in Indiana who still did some substitute teaching part time who wan also an NRA instructor and IDPA master (he introduced me to the sport). If he was still alive I’d ask him about this idiocy.
132 hours is not enough to go up against a “well armed gun man” WHO HAS HAD ZERO TRAINING!!!! Bullpucky morons. So what? He gets a majic black rifle and becomes rambo?
Y all remember this in nov and never quit the fight.
So, 132 hours is barely enough for Teacher A to exceed the performance of the Coward County S. O.? Does that include the hero who attempted, at the cost of his own life, to shield children with his own body? I wager that, equipping him with a compound bow and large quiver of broadheads, would have effected a change in outcome!
“We disparage honor, and are surprised to find traitors among us.”
When we disparage manliness, we become un able to recognize courage, standing before us.
Liberals, Get Out of The Way!