Could You Kill Someone?

/ February 22, 2018

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All the chatter about arming school teachers is making me fricking ill. My eighth grade math teacher with a gun in her hand… jaysus.

So tell me, could you kill someone?

Play it out, all the way out. Don’t just think of that instant where you believe harm is coming your way, continue to the end.

Here:

1. You believe you are in danger
2. You shoot and kill him
3. You look down and see a 19 year old
4. A 19 year old’s blood is pooling underneath him
5. Shocked, you call for help
6. People gather around and see that you just shot a 19 year old boy. They don’t know if he was a threat or not. They are screaming “what the fuck, Laura, what the fuck”
7. Police are here. You just shot a 19 year old boy. You say you felt threatened, they see a gun nearby…. they see the pool of blood underneath him.
8. You shot and killed a 19 year old. Someone’s son, brother, friend.
9. Go home and sleep. Do you see the blood pooling under him? Yes, every day and night, for the rest of your life.

Could you kill someone?

PS Don’t look to arm the unarmed, hire TRAINED military personnel, I’m sure they would love to protect some children.

Could You Kill Someone

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40 thoughts on “Could You Kill Someone?”

  1. Responding with a firearm to someone with a high rate of fire weapon in a bystander-rich place like a school is a task I would not entrust to anyone without combat experience, someone who knows from lived experience that they can be clear and steady making a threat assessment and if need be take good aim with minimum risk to bystanders while under fire from a more powerful weapon than they hold. And, they should be in active contact with the police and any other armed persons in the building. Those are rare individuals. And many who have been in that situation never want to be there again.

    I’m fairly sure that I could kill someone with a gun. I had to make some kind of peace with that prospect when the US Army handed me a rifle, but that was war in a foreign country. Still, I’m ever grateful I was never put to that test and have never owned a gun in civilian life.

    One other thought about arming teachers or other school staff; If an attacker knows who in the school is armed, that is who they will try to kill first, before they can use their gun. How often do we hear cops who have shot an unarmed person say, “I thought he was reaching for a gun.” Bad guys with a gun think the same way, he who shoots first wins.

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    • Fantastic answer. And the innocent bystanders are children, they may not “get down, get the fuck down” when told. This is all terribly frightening for my Canadian self

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      • Indeed it is frightening, and a frightening position to be in, and even the best trained and most experienced make mistakes in the heat of battle. There’s a name for some of those mistakes, “friendly fire”. Soldiers know those do happen and are a horror of war. For a teacher who would die to protect children, beyond horror.

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  2. I”m all for having armed guards in schools. Armed teachers? not such a good idea. Look at all the accidental shootings in homes. Just one accidental shooting in a school either by a teacher who over-reacted or a student who gets his mitts on the teacher’s gun somehow. Now that’s scary.

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  3. You are right about average people (and not only) having trouble actually pulling the trigger when push comes to shove. However, if I was to save many lives (many sons and daughters) by shooting that wanna be KILLER, then yes, I would and I would not cry about shooting him just because he was a kid or someone’s son.

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  9. This thread has become very surreal. No one knows how he/she will feel afterwards. People can talk tough or melt. It doesn’t matter. It is genetically programmed in us to socialize as we need others to survive. This is a basic homonid quality. Killing someone within our tribe is naturally wrong. But then that is a whole other topic.

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  10. I honestly doubt that I could. I know I wouldn’t want to. Our current laws, regarding guns, in the United States, stink. Since the tragedy in Florida I have challenged folks in my life to explain to me their reasoning behind our current system of laws and have learned that folks can be much more reasonable about it in person, one on one, than in public, when folks are watching. What is that?

    I don’t think arming teachers will help one damn bit. I don’t think we should have to be talking about school lockdowns and armed guards on campus, but we do. Until we make it harder to procure weapons of deadly force, by people who want to use it on people, we have to talk about virtually unthinkable alternatives.

    I own a gun. I don’t have any problem with people owning guns. I have a problem with people who want to hurt people owning guns. Canada. Switzerland. Germany. Australia. They have guns; legal guns. They don’t go around killing people with them at the rate that we do. Not even close. Because they have laws making it harder to get a gun. In America, we make it easy. In fact, we don’t just make it easy, we make it mandatory.

    “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”

    Poppycock.

    Of course we want to arm teachers. We want to arm EVERYONE. Gun sales are good business, and we’re all about business in America. Bloody trails and bodies? Small price to pay for the right to bear arms and maximum profits.

    Nah, I couldn’t do it. I sincerely hope I never have to.

    We have a gun problem in America. Fuck anyone who thinks we don’t.

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  11. I once skimmed through a book written by a former Navy seal that talked about ordinary people gaining skills to survive in an active shooter or terrorist situation (the same skills could apply in a fire, or an earthquake) – and what was clear is just how much training you have to get in order to learn how to think clearly when you are in danger, how to react properly, Add to this trying to tell the guilty from the innocent – how much training do police get and they still have trouble with that part of their jobs? And teachers don’t already have enough on their plates and now we want to combat train them, too??? SERIOUSLY?

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  12. Could I kill someone? Yes.

    After all, I am a former U.S. Marine and combat vet. I served in combat for one year in Vietnam back in 1966. Marines are trained to be killers and as a fighting force, Marines are really good at it. When a Marine unit opens fire with interlocking fields of fire, 4th of July fireworks shows become insignificant in comparison.

    But, do I want to kill someone? No.

    After the Marines and college on the GI Bill, I became a classroom teacher for thirty years. Knowing what I know, I do not want teachers to carry firearms to school and into their classroom.

    When you pull the trigger on a firearm, that bullet sends out a slug of soft metal designed to do loads of damage to flesh, and those bullets do not discriminate. Even if a teacher saw the shooter and fired their pistol at him, there is no guarantee that bullet will hit him and even if it did, there is no way to protect other, innocent children behind that shooter who are running around in a panic.

    A round can go through walls and hit people on the other side. A round can go through more than one wall and more than one person doing damage to all of them. Even if a teacher was a great shot and hit the shooter, that bullet could go through the shooter and hit other children or teachers.

    When I was still teaching, my classroom was surrounded by other classrooms and each classroom had an average of 34 students. No matter where I’d point a pistol, there would be a classroom with students inside. That hate-filled, angry, crazy shooter is also armed and he will not be standing out on a target range with no one around him.

    Between classes, at the high school where I taught, there were about 3,000 students on the move from one room to another one and the halls were crowded, packed. Even if you saw the shooter, the odds of hitting an innocent child would be very high.

    How would a teacher feel if they ended up killing innocent children?

    Innocent people killed in combat zones like Afghanistan or Iraq are called collateral damage.

    SInce 2001, Afghanistan has had more than 35,000 civilians killed as collateral damage. In Iraq, that number is in the hundreds of thousands.

    Since the Orange Idiot (My use of the word idiot was not meant to insult the average idiots since most idiots, I’m sure, are much better people than the Kremlin’s Agent Orange and besides, he isn’t even human. He’s a little orange alien with little hands and a very tiny lizard.) in the White House wants to arm teachers, does that mean when teachers open fire on a nut case shooter and there is collateral damage with dead children all over the place, will that be okay? Will Trump and the firearm loving GOP just shrug and say it can’t be helped. It’s collateral damage, the cost of war.

    There’s a reason Civil War General W. T. Sherman said war is hell in a speech in the late 19th century.

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  13. I think it would depend on the circumstances. If someone broke into my home and was about to hurt my mother or my grandchildren yes I could, but it would definitely haunt me for the rest of my life. I don’t think more guns are going to help. I’m a firm believer in raising the age limit for owning a gun, better background checks, and not selling a gun that should only belong to police officers or military. I also think that gun owners should be held responsible if their child does harm with a gun that should have been locked up.

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  14. Love your blog. I am new to WordPress (not blogging) and satire and snark are my favorite methods of communication. Take a look at mine (muellermusings.com.) If you don’t, I was never said a thing. I’ll still follow you. It brightens my day! 😉

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      • While I agree with hiring jobless combat vets, I think it prudent to issue a suggestion that if you plan to hire them, make sure you know what PTSD is and how to deal with it when it explodes.

        Trauma of many kinds causes PTSD: rape, bullies, internet trolls, mugging, physical child abuse, combat … and each case of PTSD manifests itself differently.

        Combat vets are primed and ready for combat all the time. Their brain, like all PTSD victims, has been damaged and their fight or flight function can’t be turned off so it is a good idea for employers to know what triggers the fight function that comes with combat vets that live with PTSD so they know how to divert it. Not all PTSD is equal. That’s why the VA rates PTSD up to 100-percent and when a combat vet is rated 100-percent, he/she is not allowed to own firearms. Vets rated at 100-percent are considered incapable of working with other people or under bosses because their trigger is very sensitive.

        I know one combat vet rated at 100-percent and he has a dog trained to distract him when it senses that his PTSD has been triggered. This friend served for 14 years. He was U.S. Marine for four years before he went into special forces for the rest of that time. Triggering this vet’s PTSD can be dangerous for anyone that triggers it.

        For instance, when he was still in uniform, he stopped on his way home at a market to buy groceries that his wife wanted. He was in uniform and four young men mouthed off that his fancy uniform didn’t mean anything. My friend had been through an in-service about controlling his PTSD so he ignored them. When he came out of the store with two fill bags of groceries, they were waiting for him and started in again making fun of him. Then one of them said they were going to follow him home and show his wife what real men were like.

        The PTSD was triggered. My friend still looked very calm as he continued to his jeep and loaded his bags into the car and then turned and faced the four bullies.

        He said, “How do you want to do this. one on one or four on one?” Without warning, the loudest mouth swung a fist at his head. There were more than twenty witnesses outside the store watching. The entire event was caught on the store’s security cameras. Later, at the police station, the police said it took my friend less than three seconds to take out all four of the bullies. The police watched the videos several times. The videos clearly showed that one of the bullies threw the first punch that never made contact. The bullies stayed locked up. My friend drove home to have a late dinner.

        Liked by 2 people

      • Shit, your poor friend. I”m so sorry for that (and proud, but still so very sorry)

        yes, you raise great points. I just can’t see Kindergarden teacher Katie having to shoot someone… I don’t want her to. 😦

        Liked by 1 person

      • I actually work with armed guards and wonder their use in an actual situation. I’ve always worried. What you think you can do, and what you do when shit goes down, could be completely different.

        It’s the shittiest situation in the world but the right answer isn’t taking guns away from the good guy.

        Liked by 1 person

      • What bothers me is that once there are laws that allows the government to take firearms away from people that are considered a risk, who decides who those people are?

        Imagine who Trump would take all the firearms away from if he had that power — a lot of honest, good people who would never end up becoming a domestic terrorist. They’d lose their firearms because they didn’t vote for him or dared to criticize him publicly in some way.

        Liked by 2 people

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