NC sheriff is stocking schools with AR-15s after Uvalde.

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When schools in one North Carolina county reopen later this month, new security measures will include stocking AR-15 rifles for school resource officers to use in the event of an active shooter. Spurred by the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead in May, school officials and Madison County Sheriff Buddy Harwood have placed one of the semiautomatic rifles in each of the county’s six schools. Each of the guns will be locked inside a safe, Harwood said.

The North Carolina school district and sheriff’s office are collaborating to enhance security after the Uvalde shooting revealed systemic failures and “egregiously poor decision-making,” resulting in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman was finally confronted and killed by law enforcement, according to a report written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives.
Harwood said the safes where the AR-15s will be kept will also hold ammunition and breaching tools for barricaded doors.

“We’ll have those tools to be able to breach that door if needed. I do not want to have to run back out to the car to grab an AR, because that’s time lost. Hopefully we’ll never need it, but I want my guys to be as prepared as prepared can be,” he said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no ... -rcna41960

The lesson of Uvalde as I see it wasn't a lack of weapons, it was the lack of leadership on the part of school, city, county, state and federal law enforcement. They never learned the basic lesson of Columbine, don't wait for SWAT but attack and stop the killing.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: NC sheriff is stocking schools with AR-15s after Uvalde.

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So the gun is locked in a safe. Who has the key or the combination to open it. The principal and the chief of security. But both of them are out meeting in another county about securing the school.

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time."- Murphy's law
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: NC sheriff is stocking schools with AR-15s after Uvalde.

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Seems legit to me. "Don't wait for SWAT" means the on-site personnel need the equipment (and training, and temperament) to be able to respond faster to a threat.

Either you want the on-site school officers to be un-equipped to handle serious threats and have to wait (while kids are dying), or they have to have the gear they need quickly accessible. Pick one.
Last edited by jc57 on Mon Aug 08, 2022 7:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Re: NC sheriff is stocking schools with AR-15s after Uvalde.

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+1 BearPaws & TT

-1 JC57 (Unless sarcastically making the point that weapons without training and willingness to sacrifice themselves for others is simply ridiculous and makes everyone at school feel more anxious rather than safe.)

The French Impressionists introduced Pointillism in Europe to illustrate how human beings see/engage the world around us: bits of information resolved in the mind’s intelligence into a larger picture.

Unfortunately the NC school district decision underscores the unfortunate American penchant for engaging the world through random-responses to disparate information sans intelligence; an exercise in performance-art which may in time be named Pointlessism.
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

Re: NC sheriff is stocking schools with AR-15s after Uvalde.

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Not sarcastic. I will take the -1, for what it is worth. Is that some official demerit thing?

I am a former (technically retired) law enforcement officer, though it has been nearly 30 years ago that I changed careers to one that does not require me to be armed in any way.

It's a job. Employers need to provide you the tools and skills to do your job right.

I knew a number of officers who worked in the local high schools. All genuine cops, good patrol officers, some of them had also been detectives. They worked plain-clothes, which meant a jacket and tie with a dress shirt and slacks, with nothing more than a .38 revolver (I did mention 30 years ago), and no body armor. It was more of a PR thing, and they were generally more concerned with things like non-students breaking into cars on the parking lots, but also any other sort of run-of-the-mill crimes that occurred on their campuses.

Times were different - they were not planning on repelling one or more assailants armed with semi-auto rifles, intent on killing random innocents.

If that is the expectation for those equivalent officers today (those I knew back then are retired), then they need to have adequate gear, training, and department policies and procedures to go along with it.

The options are: don't give them that type of weapon, and their responsibility is to observe, contain, and call in reinforcements. That would result in the "cops didn't do anything while shooters ran rampant" complaints.

Next option is that you do give them advanced arms and/or armor and breaching tools, and they have to carry them on their person at all times. So then you'd have the complaint of "militarized cops on campuses" because they would be in full combat gear all the time.

Third option is you give them the advanced equipment, but it is stored someplace, and they would have to get to it. That could be a in police vehicle out on the parking lot, or in one or more safes of some kind at the building.

That third option seems to be what they are proposing. Again, to me, it does not seem on its face to be an especially bad idea, if you are expecting those on-site cops to respond to Uvalde type situations versus waiting until backup arrives.

Other options are: don't have cops on campus at all, or have them lightly equipped and have them call in reinforcements and wait. Or tell them they have to go up against someone with a rifle, while armed with a 9mm and a dress shirt.

Re: NC sheriff is stocking schools with AR-15s after Uvalde.

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Clearly my old memories of the school resource officer in our Los Angeles HS some thirty years ago fit JC57’s description: shirt, tie, sports jacket, .38 tucked somewhere hidden. To us he walked the halls with his mustache and dark complexion like a Latino 007... licensed to kill. None of us ever imagined he had any vulnerabilities. Nobody clearly understood his mission.

But that was the halcyon day’s of “The Breakfast Club” where Emilio Estévez characterized the epitome of “danger” for a student of Suburbia. Columbine would go a long way to redefine that idea just 10 years later.

Good points made. I change my mind:
+1 JC57.
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

Re: NC sheriff is stocking schools with AR-15s after Uvalde.

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highdesert wrote: Mon Aug 08, 2022 1:36 pm
When schools in one North Carolina county reopen later this month, new security measures will include stocking AR-15 rifles for school resource officers to use in the event of an active shooter. Spurred by the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead in May, school officials and Madison County Sheriff Buddy Harwood have placed one of the semiautomatic rifles in each of the county’s six schools. Each of the guns will be locked inside a safe, Harwood said.

The North Carolina school district and sheriff’s office are collaborating to enhance security after the Uvalde shooting revealed systemic failures and “egregiously poor decision-making,” resulting in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman was finally confronted and killed by law enforcement, according to a report written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives.
Harwood said the safes where the AR-15s will be kept will also hold ammunition and breaching tools for barricaded doors.

“We’ll have those tools to be able to breach that door if needed. I do not want to have to run back out to the car to grab an AR, because that’s time lost. Hopefully we’ll never need it, but I want my guys to be as prepared as prepared can be,” he said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no ... -rcna41960

The lesson of Uvalde as I see it wasn't a lack of weapons, it was the lack of leadership on the part of school, city, county, state and federal law enforcement. They never learned the basic lesson of Columbine, don't wait for SWAT but attack and stop the killing.
So, an active shooter and the 'resource officer' runs away to the safe..assuming the 'resource officer' doesn't run away....how about good training, good communication and not a pile of tacticool cowards in the hallway. How about running towards the threat to do what you are paid to do. The gun doesn't matter.

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