Very insightful and illustrative post,
@branmuffin
Personally, I'm going to disagree with you and many here, just about the aspect of arming teachers. We are products of our environments in many respects, and I am someone who has never handled a gun, nor had the least desire to learn how.
This is NYC, where certainly criminals get their hands on guns. However, in NYC proper, as opposed to the rest of NY state, this is not a gun culture for the average citizen. I've seen guns because my cousin is a Federal detective and my brother-in-law is a police captain, plus my husband and father-in-law used to go down to Virginia to hunt, but I've never touched one and don't want to.
I'm retired now but did teach for 25 years. All the teachers here on WS know that our job goes far, far beyond the academics. We play many roles in support of our students. When we are home we are still thinking about how to help the troubled kids, even as we grade essays and prepare lessons.
However, speaking only for myself, if the day had come that I'd be required to receive gun training and be armed in the classroom, that would be the day I'd have had to quit teaching.
I know myself. I would not be able to shoot that gun if need be, and I'd be as likely to accidentally shoot myself or an innocent child as to kill an intruder. It's just not something I could do, and not at all something that IMO is part of the job of a teacher.
To me, being expected to shoot somebody as a teacher would be expecting me to combine two very different occupations. It would be as foreign to my profession as asking me to pilot an airplane during class.
In all other ways I agree whole-heartedly with BranMuffin's post. Many things went wrong, starting from SR's social media texts not getting attention from authorities, to his ability to purchase assault rifles, to the door being propped open, to the delayed police response.
I thoroughly understand that many of my fellow Websleuthers grew up in gun cultures and are familiar and comfortable with guns, but I still maintain that the job of teaching should not require us to also do the job of law enforcement.
Jmo
ETA: Has there been any update on how the grandmother is doing? I haven't seen anything about her