Ted Cruz is a stone cold genius
PROBLEM SOLVED.
Totally utterly completely solved. Boom.
Except. Well, just a few details.
One, you can’t have just one door for every school.
Two, you can’t have two armed cops on duty at all times at every school.
Three, what are they supposed to do, “take out” everyone who approaches the door?
Other than that, PROBLEM TOTALLY SOLVED.
Updating to add a fourth tiny problem with Cruz’s otherwise brilliant plan:
Approximately 40 minutes to an hour passed from when the gunman first arrived at Robb Elementary and fired a shot at a security guard to when he was killed by a Border Patrol agent, according to The Associated Press.
Witnesses shouted at police to go into the school after the gunman, but the officers did not do so initially.
Still a BRILLIANT PLAN though.
There was a cop there who confronted the shooter, and was shot (non-fatally) by him. Perhaps we need to issue the cops bigger guns.
Also, yeah, one door for several hundred students. Smart idea, Ted.
I wonder if Teddy is willing to sign onto the tax increase needed to have a full-time cop on duty at every school in America. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and it came out to around $7.2 billion per year, just for wages–doesn’t even count benefits, pensions, etc.
Here’s a thought. Just put a Dunkin’ Donuts at the entrance of every school. Problem solved! (I worked at a DD in high school. Found out on my first day that cops only paid if they’re taking out–cops at the counter got their fixes free.)
So… No negotiating, no attempts to disarm or arrest, no taking into custody or trial, just “take them out.” More police shootouts and executions to further increase gun violence. Just eliminate due process and preventative measures altogether and “take them out.”
I think Ted has watched a few too many westerns and police dramas.
So then the cops would all be in the Dunkin’ Donuts sucking down their free coffee when the gunman showed up. I’m not seeing how that solves the problem? No wait, I get it, you mean they’d be wide awake and alert when he showed up. Good plan! Provided they can get off their stools and outside and at the school door fast enough. Could need some stats and blueprints n stuff here.
The other problem is the schools would effectively become prisons with one door with armed guards, what else? Razor wire fences, searches, metal detectors, guard towers, permanently locked down campuses, complete with scheduled detainments of the students? Grade school and high school felt enough like being institutionalized back when I went, I wouldn’t be trapped in school like that.
Aren’t there laws about having multiple exits in large buildings to allow people to escape fires?
Are there no lengths to which Republicans will not go to avoid any whiff of gun control? The fetishization of the Second Amendment has cost an untold number of lives in a slow-motion civil war. Considering the “Founding Fathers” thought keeping human beings as property was okey-dokey, one wonders why some of their other ideas are not treated with a bit more skepticism. But like the selective reading of biblical literalists can disregard inconvenient passages, gun nuts are happy enough to ignore the whole “well regulated militia” bit.
My idea is to have the DD right at the entrance, so you have to walk through it to get to the school. The cops wouldn’t even have to get up to have a clear shot.
I’m sure the teachers and students would appreciate it too.
@7:
Probably. Likely.
Cruz’s “plan” is bad for fire safety.
Do psychopaths have signs floating over their heads? Do you know who they are if you have special glasses? Do psychopaths who have no intention of killing anyone show up differently from those who do?
Re me @1, now they’re saying that he wasn’t confronted by an officer before he entered the school.
I gave Cruz the modest benefit of the doubt and assumed he wasn’t talking about bricking over every other door–they’d just have to be turned into one-way fire exits, locked until someone hits the crash-bar, setting off the alarm. Or at least, I assumed that if someone pointed out that particular issue, his handlers would’ve come up with the “Of course we’d..” line.
But of course, that amount of reconstruction would be pretty expensive, too. Assuming a typical school building currently has 2-10 exit doors, turning all of those into fire exits would probably run about 10-20K per school. So that means our first-year cost of his plan is going to be another $1.4-2.8 Billion dollars, just for door installation. Of course, then we have to make the windows out of that stuff you see in banks (or just brick them all over). We can put the cost of that at over a cool 10 Billion, considering the number of windows involved, here.
Oh, and since funneling the kids in through a single door will pack them all into what shooters call a ‘target rich environment’, all the schools will also need a large barrier fence (height determined by the height of the surrounding buildings) surrounding a staging area where the kids can be dropped off by the bus. So, we can expect another $50 Billion in giant wall construction costs. Maybe he can get Mexico to pay for that part.
If the police crash in with guns blazing, they may kill more children than Ramos. It seems they were trying to follow a playbook that was more about hostage takers than suicidal spree-killers or terrorists.