The state of Texas, ever the testing ground for horrendously bad policy, has in one of its school districts decided to allow teachers to carry guns in the classroom.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080815/ts_nm/texas_guns_dc
<font size=4>Texas school district to let teachers carry guns</font>
Fri Aug 15, 3:32 PM ET
HOUSTON (Reuters) – A Texas school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district’s superintendent said on Friday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.
The board of the small rural Harrold Independent School District unanimously approved the plan and parents have not objected, said the district’s superintendent, David Thweatt.
School experts backed Thweatt’s claim that Harrold, a system of about 110 students 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth, may be the first to let teachers bring guns to the classroom.
Thweatt said it is a matter of safety.
“We have a lock-down situation, we have cameras, but the question we had to answer is, ‘What if somebody gets in? What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s just common sense.”
Teachers who wish to bring guns will have to be certified to carry a concealed handgun in Texas and get crisis training and permission from school officials, he said.
Recent school shootings in the United States have prompted some calls for school officials to allow students and teachers to carry legally concealed weapons into classrooms.
The U.S. Congress once barred guns at schools nationwide, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck the law down, although state and local communities could adopt their own laws. Texas bars guns at schools without the school’s permission.
(Reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio; writing by Bruce Nichols in Houston, editing by Vicki Allen)
Here’s an accompanying link courtesy of SmirkingChimp.com:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/16482
Nearly any time we put on any kind of public event, the NRA would send its hired-gun “PR firm,” the Mercury Group, to stake out our press conferences, report releases, or fundraisers with their camerapeople. And just like Bill O’Reilly’s ambush producers, they would try and disrupt the event by shouting leading questions based on studies from their favorite researchers. Quite often they would yell things like, “Considering John Lott’s study that the availability of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens reduces crime, why do you . . . ?” And then the president of our organization, at the time a savvy guy named Bob Walker, would have to sidetrack the issue at hand in order to point out how Lott’s studies had been discredited by legitimate academic researchers, and that, as Matt Bai of Newsweek once wrote, Lott had “been shown the door at some of the nation’s finest schools.”
After a TV appearance, Lott once chased my immediate boss down a hallway, shouting at her that she’d have “blood on her hands.” He has been famously exposed as his own sock-puppet. He logged onto Amazon.com under a pseudonym, “Mary Rosh,” and gave his own books five-star ratings, claiming that Lott was “the best professor I ever had.” But what do you expect from a guy who has published articles that claim that crime goes up when there are more black officers on a city police force, and that allowing teachers to carry concealed handguns in schools will deter school shootings?
How much do you want to bet that the Harrold Independent School District based its decision in large part on the basis of Lott’s deceptive and unsubstantiated claims? Here’s another bit from the Smirking Chimp column:
You see, no matter how much the NRA spends each election season to tilt the scales, or how many politicians whose offices it can “work right out of” (as it said about Bush in 2000), all it takes is one loon with a lot of firepower, and the NRA retreats back inside its bunker and offers “no comment.”
When 58-year-old Jim Adkisson got tired of all the liberals he felt were taking away jobs and wrecking society, he allegedly loaded up with 76 shells and a shotgun he bought at a pawnshop and headed for a liberal Unitarian church in Knoxville, Tenn., to shoot it up. It’s the sort of crime the NRA, months from now, will argue that could be prevented “if you let law-abiding citizens carry guns to church.” I’m sure even Mary Rosh would agree.
Anyone care to disagree?
Bowling for Columbine came on cable right after I saw your diary. I’d never watched it before tonight. What the fuck is wrong with us here in the states? Our answer to the tragedy of school shootings is more guns in schools? Could we give our children a break from our sickness if even for a few hours?
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The first Innocence Project arson case actually focuses on two Texas cases, those of Ernest Ray Willis and Cameron Todd Willingham. These men were convicted and sentenced to die for setting fatal fires in 1986 and 1991, respectively. The evidence in both cases was remarkably similar. The conclusions of the fire investigators that the fires were incendiary was based on low burns and irregular burn patterns, “indicators” that were once accepted by many, but have now been largely discredited, at least in cases where fires grow to involve the entire room or structure. Other indicators relied upon in these cases included annealed furniture springs, discolored concrete, and crazed glass. In the Willinhgham case, auto-ventilation was described as an indicator of an incendiary fire, and in the Willis case, the amount of damage to the ceiling was said to correlate to the amount of flammable liquid on the floor, even though all of the samples came back negative.
In both cases, the investigators knew they had their man because the suspects gave accounts of the fire that did not comport with the investigator’s interpretation of the indicators.
What caught the attention of the Innocence Project about these two cases was the remarkable difference in the ultimate outcome. After many years of appeals, Mr. Willis was granted a new trial, but realizing the inaccuracy of the incendiary determination, the prosecutor in the Willis case moved to have the charges dismissed. Mr. Willingham’s appeals were not successful, and he was put to death on February 17, 2004.
The Arson Review Committee [pdf] was formed in late January of this year, and over the next two months, the committee members reviewed the reports and trial testimony of the experts in both cases. On May 2, the committee’s report was submitted to the Texas Forensic Science Commission for review, and released to the public. The report, along with supporting documentation, may be viewed by clicking the links below, or at the Innocence Project‘s website.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."