I caught wind of this because of an AOC tweet.

You know, instead of training children, teachers, houses of faith, & concertgoers to prep for being shot, we could just:

-Pass Universal Background checks (#HR8!)
-Disarm domestic abusers
-Mandate safe storage
-Ban bump stocks, semiautos, & high cap mags designed to kill people https://t.co/5SaLxEfYBT

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 22, 2019

So…

One: Universal Background Checks would not have stopped Sandy Hook, Parkland, or any other mass shooting in memory.  Such bills always end up criminalizing normal gun owner behavior without impacting crime.  Add to this the impossibility to enforce this without registration.

Two: Domestic abusers are already prohibited persons.  Unless she is talking about the so-called “boyfriend loophole” which anti-gunners want to apply the Lautenberg Amendment to non married, non cohabitating couples.  Faithful readers of this blog know I’ve covered just how bad of an idea that is.

Three: Bump stocks may have been used in one crime, once.  If we had our New Zealand moment, that was it.  The ATF turned countless thousands of people into felons because of media hype from one shooting.  A semi-auto ban is arguably unconstitutional and would rip the nation in half.  A mag capacity ban is also arguably unconstitutional, not be enforceable, and would rip the nation in half.  Also, who the fuck are you to tell me how many rounds is enough?

But these are all the same points we’ve gone back and forth on before.

I wanted to read the Indy Star article she was tweeting about.

‘It hurt so bad’: Indiana teachers shot with plastic pellets during active shooter training

I seem to remember having a Drill Sargent with the Army yell at me in my youth “pain is weakness leaving the body” and “an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood.”

I am partial to the “pain is your friend” speech from G.I. Jane.

So pray tell, what hurt so bad.

An active-shooter training exercise at an Indiana elementary school in January left teachers with welts, bruises and abrasions after they were shot with plastic pellets by the local sheriff’s office conducting the session.

The incident, acknowledged in testimony this week before state lawmakers, was confirmed by two elementary school teachers in Monticello, who described an exercise in which teachers were asked by local law enforcement to kneel down against a classroom wall before being sprayed across their backs with plastic pellets without warning.

“They told us, ‘This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing,’” said one of the two teachers, both of whom asked IndyStar not to be identified out of concern for their jobs. “They shot all of us across our backs. I was hit four times.

“It hurt so bad.”

Good.  I hope it hurt.  I hope it drove home the lesson of why active shooter response training is so important.

You know why?  Because real bullets hurt more than plastic pellets, and maybe had the teachers in Parkland all been shot with with some ramped up Airsoft, they wouldn’t have let 14 kids die.

Now, these teachers and the state’s largest teachers union want to stop this from happening in other Hoosier schools.

What a bunch of dangerous, cowardly, pussies.

The Indiana State Teachers Association is lobbying lawmakers to add language prohibiting teachers from being shot with any sort of ammunition to a school safety bill working its way through the Statehouse.

Next time, rock salt.

“What we’re looking for is just a simple statement in this bill that would prohibit the shooting of some type of projectile at staff in an active-shooter drill,” said Gail Zeheralis, director of government relations for the ISTA during testimony in support of House Bill 1004 before lawmakers Wednesday.

Then what exactly is the point?

Teachers at Meadowlawn Elementary School were supposed to be receiving what is called ALICE training, an “options-based” approach that encourages students and teachers to be proactive in their response to an active shooter and teaches tactics that include rushing a shooter in some situations.

Thousands of schools across the country, including many in Indiana, are using ALICE already. Shooting teachers with plastic pellets is not typically part of the training.

It should be.  We say in Broward, both for the teachers and the BSO just how useless a PowerPoint presentation is.  Half the room is nose down in their phones not giving a shit.  That’s the teacher you need to shoot first, right in the forehead.

White County Sheriff Bill Brooks, whose department led the training in question, said it has conducted active-shooter training with schools for several years and has previously used the airsoft gun.

The plastic pellets they used are 4.6 mm in diameter — slightly larger than a standard BB.

“It’s a soft, round projectile,” he said. “The key here is ‘soft.'”

You know what else is soft?  The teachers, and that’s a problem.

Brooks became sheriff in January and said he couldn’t say if or how many times teachers had been shot with it previously. He was present for part of the January training, but not the portion in which the airsoft gun was used.

“They all knew they could be,” Brooks said. “It’s a shooting exercise.”

Brooks said all the teachers involved signed up to participate. He said the department was told several weeks after the training that one teacher was upset by it. They’ve since stopped using the airsoft gun with teachers, he said.

“We were made aware that one teacher was upset,” he said. “And we ended it.”

Cowards and pussies.

The group came back out and whispered a warning to the next group — the officers had told them not to tell their colleagues what had happened — but she still wasn’t expecting what came next.

“It was like a quick spew of those pellets,” she said. “Most of us got hit several times in our backs.”

She said she had welts and one spot where the pellet broke her skin. It was scabbed over for several weeks.

Oh horseshit.

The two teachers who spoke with IndyStar said they wanted to do the training. Even after getting shot with plastic pellets that left welts and bruises and drew blood, they finished the rest of the training.

“We didn’t want to quit the training because it seemed important,” said one teacher. “It really was more than it needed to be.”

She said the other training exercises were useful, including one in which an officer pretending to be an active shooter shot the airsoft gun while teachers hid under desks and were given tennis balls to throw at him until he stopped shooting.

I’d sign up for the training, then bring my own Airsoft gun.

One of the provisions included in House Bill 1004 is a requirement that all schools conduct an active-shooter drill at least once a year. However, it does not mandate any specific type of training program. The drill requirement was among 18 school safety recommendations made last year by a committee pulled together by Gov. Eric Holcomb in the wake of the massacre at a Parkland, Florida, high school and last spring’s shooting at Noblesville Middle School.

Call me a cynic, but what I foresee is a bunch of bullshit training in which teachers treat it like a day they can slack off, and not take it seriously.

It’s not that individual teachers are bad people, but I know how employees and bureaucrats behave.  Give them an opportunity to watch a video and take a half day and they will.

Sheriff Brooks said that’s unnecessary, though.

“We don’t need legislation in White County,” he said. “We’re just not going to do it.”

Sheriff Israel 2.0

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Wendy McNamara, seemed amenable Wednesday to an addition of some sort. The Evansville Republican is a high school principal in Evansville Vanderburgh Schools. Because the bill has already passed the House, though, McNamara will have to work with the Senate committee to get an amendment passed.

“I don’t believe something like that should take place in an active-shooter drill,” she said.

You can’t have good school security with shit-as training.

During the Iraq war, transpo units had very high casualty rates.  Insurgents attacked convoys, but the reason they did is that the Army hadn’t updated it’s training for the modern battlefield.  Non front line combat troops, like transpo, were totally unequipped and untrained so would get hit in an ambush and would not know how to respond.  They were easy pickings for insurgents.

The Army had to start training transpo units on combat maneuvers like repelling and ambush, and arming them appropriately.

Shit-ass training cost far too many non-combat troops their lives.

It seems teachers here have the same attitude.  They don’t want to do this so only want shit-ass useless, sweat free, training.  The kind of training that failed miserably in Parkland.

What is worse is that Indiana seems to want to appeal to the lowest common denominator.  If Miss Wormwood doesn’t want to get shot with Airsoft, than nobody else can either.

In one year, we’ve learned nothing from Parkland.

Maybe teachers shouldn’t have to do this, but until we can figure out how to ban single mothers who use ADD medication as a substitute for a father figure, this is going to keep on happening, and we should be prepared.