Off - Wot No Brock?!/ captured rotation

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 11:29:27AM +0100, M Holmes typed out:
> I raised a pint to that last weekend. It's time teachers took seriously
> their responsibilities for the safety of their pupils and were trained
> and ready to shoot would-be rappage-killers.
> 
> Oh that we weren't so cowardly in my country.

	There isn't really the demand, though, is there? Other than 
Dunblane, it's hard to find any evidence of school shootings in the UK. 
It's hard to say that this isn't related to the limits on the 
availbility of guns. Of course, you can find cases of stabbings and even 
a worrying number of attacks with flamethrowers (!), which I suppose you 
could say armed guards would have presented; but I wonder how many 
children would also have been shot for doing things that looked like 
attacks. Either way, your response here looks a lot like trying to solve 
a problem that substantially, we don't have, by adopting methods that 
are at best implicated, and at worst directly involved in, cases 
elsewhere where that problem is real and only checked by measures like 
this that involve escalation.

	Though I see that really it's all down to Harry Potter, which 
obviously explains *everything*.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-408490/Ban-Harry-Potter-face-school-shootings.html

After all, those books are illegal in the UK, and we have hardly 
any shootings. Oh no hang on, that's guns. Well, no relevance there 
obviously, moving on. Yours,
			     Jon

-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk