As If Textbooks Weren't Expensive Enough: Now Someone Wants To Make Them Bulletproof
from the say-what? dept
School shootings certainly get an awful lot of attention -- for very good reasons. However, for all the talk of school shootings they're pretty rare events. Still, that hasn't stopped a widespread discussion on ways to help prevent them and increase the safety of schoolchildren. Some of those discussions are quite worthwhile, but some of the ideas seem a bit far out there. The Raw Feed points us to one such idea: make textbooks bulletproof (literally). Then, when some outcast student starts shooting up the place, the kids can just duck behind their biology textbook and feel safe. We're not exactly clear on how they're supposed to protect their whole body using this method, but the guy behind the plan (who's also a candidate for state school superintendent in Oklahoma) insists it would save lives. Of course, he also admits he's not sure how much it would actually cost to coat textbooks in kevlar or come up with some other means of bulletproofing them -- and we suspect that at almost any price, that money could be better spent on other programs that have a far higher likelihood of helping to keep kids safe.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Wrong type of cover....
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Key sentence
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how about, equip all teachers with a stunner, and campus security with transquilizer to put down the insurgents?
we can just keep coming up with more ideas but most will just be too inconvenient and/or are too inefficient to enforce.
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I smell profit
Someone ponting a gun at you?
Just turn around and duck your head and your entire torso is protected.
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not much need
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The last thing we need
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"just" turn around and duck your head.
.."duck your head"...please...
Give the teachers a stun gun...doh...
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Unfortunately that won't work either. My old highschool's security officer(actual city police officer) was fired for using a taser on a student. He had completely legitimate resons for doing so, but nevertheless he was fired. Why let the man carry one if he has no authority to use it?
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Search and Destroy
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Guns
Overall it sounds like a pretty poor idea by another self-absorbed politician that just wants to say something to feel good about.
There's too many conventional ways to stop this gun problem already. I'd suggest the first to be a TRUE Zero Tolerance rule on bullying, then we can talk about less effective and less conventional ways if that doesn't drastically reduce shootings...
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In perspective
The truth is that many places in Oklahoma don't even have a custom of locking doors. If your neighbor needs something, he might come into your house while you're away and borrow a tool. (Which is followed up by gifts of big bake pans full of food.) Some of the "rednecks" have engineering degrees from colleges, but choose to live the redneck life rather than work some shitty job in a faraway city.
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Ballistic Joe...
How do you have a "TRUE Zero Tolerance" on bullying? What constitutes bullying? Shoving? Teasing? Ignoring? Excluding? Name-calling? Rejecting? If there's "zero" tolerance...
Should the hot girls get expelled for not wanting to go out with the obese, sweaty kid? What about the hot girls???
Bullying is a lot like porn: Most whiney pricks claim they'll "Know it when they see it" but none have a good deffinition. Kinda like you, balltastic joe.
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Get Rid of the Guns.
It's getting where it's easier for an underage teen to get a gun than a six pack.
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Hmmm...
No matter what we attempt to do to prevent school shootings/bullying/etc, there will always be someone who bypasses those precautions, just like may other things *ie: DRM protection / server security (compromised daily) / etc...*
The only way we could prevent school shootings is if each student was home schooled seperately from every other student. But it wont stop bullying...
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Phew
Eventually they'll just get so stupid that they'll be compelled to shoot at the target and not understand why it's not working.
Everybody laughed at me when I started wearing Kevlar underwear but they'll see... oh, they'll see alright. I've got my priorities in order.
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Root Cause
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Re: Key sentence
Sorry, you are incorrect here. The kinetic energy from a 180 to 200 grain bullet is insufficient to knock someone back...that is Hollywood. The energy transfer from a bullet hitting a hand held book would be like holding a block of wood for a martial artist while they kick it in half. My concern with this ballastic book solution is that it would give kids a sense of protection that is not there in reality. They need to address the problem and screen people coming into the school better than they do. As a retired police officer, I can tell you from experience that proactive enforcement and protection is light years ahead of even the best reactive solutions and scenarios.
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Re:
And suffer the same increase in muggings, assault, and battery.
Or, we can look to Canada where gun ownership is pretty similar to the states - but without anywhere near the violent crime rate - and try to figure out the difference. Or, we could look to Switzerland where everybody is required to own a gun and be certified in the use of a fully automatic weapon (or something along those lines), again with nothing close to the crime rate.
I'm not saying that increased gun ownership creates a more peaceful society. I'm not saying that banning guns creates a more violent society. I'm saying that for the most part, guns are not the problem. A gun is a tool, and as with any other tool, it can be used for either good or bad at the whim of the user.
The problem is not guns, video games, music, tag, dodgeball, or riding a bicycle without a helmet. The solution to school violence is not banning guns. It is not bulletproof textbooks. it is not more metal detectors, or political stump-speeches, or tazer-weilding cops in the schools.
The solution is to figure out why people turn to violence more often here than other places.
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Hollywood VS Reality
Newton and ballistic realities would disagree. Unlike the movies, in the real world people do not get blown back when shot, especially with handgun rounds. Think about it, if someone shot a round powerful enough to knock the targeted person back, it would also knock the shooter back upon firing. It would be like the scene in MIB when Wil Smith fires the Cricket.
Avatar28: "...it would likely already prove somewhat bullet resistant for at least a lower caliber bullet. Probably wouldn't stop a .45 or anything but smaller handguns, yeah"
Only partly true. Yes, a thick text book would stop many typical defensive calibers, INCLUDING the .45 ACP you and many people think is some magical Hammer of Thor.
The 45ACP is a slow moving (typically subsonic) fat round. It's great for causing a big hole (crush cavity) and has decent stopping power against unarmored flesh.
When it comes to defeating armor, it is a very poor performer due to the aforementioned characteristics. There are in fact plenty of documented police shootings where the criminal was shot in the head with a 45ACP round and the bullet bounced/deflected off the skull.
Don't be a chairborne commando; bigger bullet diameter does not always = more power.
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Re:
...and the knives, and rocks and baseball bats and trigonometry compasses and scissors...squirt guns with rat poison/DMSO..flare guns, matches/pencils/magazines, screwdrivers, nails
and TURNIPS... this is the funniest and yet saddest because 10 or so years ago someone in the UK was killed when someone driving threw a 5 lb turnip at a guy and it killed him.
So no, guns are not the problem, I use guns all the time and have yet to kill or injure a single person as is the case with a majority of gun owners.
To quote Archie Bunker from "All in the Family"
Gloria: Do you know how many people die every year from guns?
Archie: Would it make you feel any better if they were pushed out of windows?
Anger is the problem, not the tool used.
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Re: Re:
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Re: Root Cause
I really think that the problem is that we're teaching our kids that there is no such thing as wrong.
Everyone is right, everyone's opinion is valid, your not supposed to put down other peoples ideas.
If little billy believes that it's ok to blow the other kids away then he's entitled to that opinion.
What we need to do is teach the kids at an early age that there is a right, and there is a wrong.
Putting the ten commandments back in school would be a good start for this. Forget the religious part of it, these are just really good rules for life. (Don't kill, Dont steal, Dont sleep with you neighbors wife, etc.)
If we taught kids that it is just plain wrong to do these things when they are young, then there would be less murders, less corporate crime, and less devorce in this country.
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why violence..
I believe I know why, at least for schools: the kids, especially the "different" ones that "Steve" has issues about(scared by Dracula as a child I'm guessing...grow up Stevie), see a totalitarian society building around them that is offering them fewer and fewer choices and even fewer ways of expressing themselves, and when compounded with bullying, etc. some are going to look at the attitudes portrayed in our movies/TV(not blaming them but they do factor in) and think that if it's hopeless they might as well get revenge before they cash in or that if they're caught that someone will FINALLY listen to their side of the story(and boy do we listen then, huh).
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Re: why violence..
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you can't see the trees for the forrest.
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already bulletproof
Maybe kid should just carry thicker book?
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You are missing
Eh? you ask...
Greed can be manifest in many ways, but some of them are....
Hording Money....
Hording Power....
Hording Influence...
Who frustrates us? The jocks, chearleaders, rich, politicians... The IN crowd, that won't let others join...
Greed is human nature, only those that suffered it, survived bad winters.
Want to fix society? Control your own and teach your children to control their Greed.
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Re: Re:
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The problem with America is that everyone is afraid. The teachers are afraid of the students, the students are afraid of getting killed, the killers are afraid of being rejected by society and living dead end lives, the parents are afraid of their children and anything else the media tells them to be afraid of, the media is afraid that no one will watch their programs and they won't make enough money (what is "enough"?) with their ad-revenue so they keep throwing shocking & horrible stories up there to keep everyone afraid.
Fearful consumers keep consuming. America's economy runs on fear.
That's why a STUPID idea like making text books bullet-proof actually has a chance to make it. That's why people think about it seriously. It seems like the proverbial "snowball in hell" is getting colder instead of melting.
We as a society need to focus on fixing the problem from the beginning --not just patching up the results of our mistakes. We need to raise our children better NOT because we're afraid that they might go postal and shoot up a school one day, but because we want them to live better lives.
Haven't we seen enough stupid people with bad ideas in powerful positions? Get this moron out of the running for superintendent!
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When some WoW playing, emo listening, closet dwelling troglodite steals a gun or makes a bomb to blow up his school, he should be met with a trained and armed response, and summarily shot dead.
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Re:
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Re: Root Cause
You want to keep your kids safe? Have a zero-tolerance policy on lousy parenting.
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two cents worth
Personal Responsibility, wake up America.
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Re:
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Re: no 14
If you really want to save kids lives, then take a lession from the UK.
Get Rid of the Guns.
i think we should take a lesson from china and get rid of the kids.
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momentium and energy
momentum is equal to m*v (mass x velocity) and that must be equal, i.e. a 200 grain bullet moving at 1200 fps (feet per second) has a certain momentium, and by law, momentum is conserved. so when that bullet hits a person of say 60 lbs (depending on school age) the new velocity must be equal to (mv/(m+M)) where m,v is mass/velocity of bullet, and M is weight of child) since m
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Simpler Solution
To summarize: Treat others the way you wish to be treated, Don't enforce your value system upon another, don't interfere with another (person or country, or peoples) value system. And most importantly, take responsibility for your actions.
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What are textbooks?
Maybe we should be referencing bullet-proof laptops...
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Re: Re: Key sentence
But I do agree with your point, it is a false sense of security at best.
What kinds of proactive solutions have you seen that work best? I've always wondered about the metal detectors and how effective they really are.
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just another thought
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Completely off subject, but I couldnt help myself
LOL was a crazy idea...and to think... this guy wants to be superintendent.. I would love to have this guy making decisions about the school that my kid attends.
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Re: Re:
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Re: Hollywood VS Reality
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Re: Re: Hollywood VS Reality
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STUPID
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Re: Violent Canadians
I was not implying that Canada is totally free of violence and shootings, and I certainly didn't say that. What I said was "nowhere near", which is true. The per-capita murder rate in the US (#24 worldwide) is nearly three-fold that of Canada (#44 worldwide). (and 4.6 times that of Switzerland, #56)
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Re: Re: Violent Canadians
... is about .043 per 1000, which means 1 whole person per 23,300 people is murdered in the US each year, or about 12,900 (mind you, only about 8300 of those are murders with firearms, meaning 4600 people are murdered in some other creative fashion) dead bodies out of 300,000,000. That's total - the total yearly body count in schools can be measured in the tens. Realistically, school is already one of the safest places you can be, bulletproof texts or no (just to bring this back to point).
So, for those of you keeping score at home, the important thing to note here is that (like so many other issues) the actual severity of the problem being discussed has been blown all out or proportion in the name of sensationalism.
Anybody want a used soapbox?
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MORE guns needed
Look at the success of nations full of guns:
Afghanistan
Iraq
Cambodia
Nicaragua
El Salvador
Guns make us all safe. 500 million guns in the USA can't protect us all, we need at least a billion.
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Re: MORE guns needed
Russia
China
Cuba
(etc. etc.)
Whatever. Straw-man arguments carry no weight. Do you care to offer a point, or just empty rhetoric?
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Re: Re: Hollywood VS Reality
Care to expand on this? Tell me this isn't some inane racist crap.
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Re: Re:
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Re: already bulletproof
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Bullet proof paranoia
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What do you suggest
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bulletproof
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