Later in the interview, he clarifies that he believes in the same number of EXITS but fewer ENTRANCES. Does Dan Patrick know how doors work
— erin ryan (@morninggloria) May 20, 2018
Oh fer fuck’s sake:
Texas GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said after the nation’s latest school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, that teachers need guns, parents should secure firearms safely at home, and schools should eliminate some of their entrances.
“We need our teachers to be armed,” Patrick said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”Patrick also called for “gun control at home,” with firearms out of childrens’ reach, but declined to say whether he would support requiring that by law, saying Texas holds gun owners “very responsible.”
“Be sure that your kids and grandkids or anyone who might have access to your home cannot get your guns,” Patrick said.
The latest school shooting in Texas on Friday left 10 people dead and 13 others wounded. In the wake of the shooting, Patrick blamed the deaths in part on “too many entrances and too many exits.”
Patrick repeated his argument about entrances on Sunday.
“We need to get down to one or two entrances into our schools,” Patrick said, adding, “You have the necessary exits for fire, of course, but we have to funnel our students into our schools so we can put eyes on them.”
Texas, being Texas, will probably make this guy their next governor.
One of my wingnut friends from the Army who resides in Texas had a comment thread on Facebook about the shooting, and one of his fellow travelers blamed the shooting on liberal laws, stating that if teachers had been allowed to spank the guy for wearing a trenchcoat every day, this never would have happened. Which is only about as dumb as blaming this shooter on the wide availability of… doors.
Baud
Meh. There are one way doors using this new fangled technology called locks. It won’t help keep schools safe, but one way doors do exist.
debbie
Jesus, Patrick shows less compassion than Abbott. That’s scarifying!
smintheus
@Baud: Patrick probably thinks the schools are using movie-saloon half doors, with everybody’s eyes turning whenever a guy with a gun pushes his way in through them.
Jerzy Russian
Is it actually illegal for a student to have a gun at a school in Texas? If so, what can anyone do when that student walks through that single door armed?
Suzanne
It is fucking stupid to suggest redesigning every American school when we can’t even buy paper, but this tweeter is an idiot. We design doors for egress and no ingress all the time.
Major Major Major Major
That’s a fresh take.
@Baud: well then why don’t we just make every wall out of doors!? Checkmate, libtard
Baud
@smintheus:
https://goo.gl/images/FzaiPb
dmsilev
@smintheus: And, of course, you can always tell whether it’s a Good Guy With A Gun or a Bad Guy With A Gun based on what music the pianist in playing.
Jeffro
Do other Western democracies’ schools have doors? Just curious
Baud
@dmsilev: And the color of their hat.
Suzanne
@Jerzy Russian: The bigger concern is actually that making everybody go to one place to enter is arguably even more dangerous, as everyone would be concentrated. That’s what happened at the Ariana Grande concert, though they were exiting rather than entering.
In certain parts of the country, like in AZ, schools were built ultra-cheaply with exterior circulation, and it is problematic from a security perspective. Classrooms get busted into, kids can easily ditch, homeless people piss in the stairways, etc. So I actually do support making schools more defensible, and I say that as an architect. (My office has been making a lot of money doing “hardening” projects on many of these old campuses, so take that FWIW.) It’s fucking ridiculous to suggest that that will stop shootings, though. In fact, I think concentrating people at fewer access points actually has the potential to make shootings even more deadly.
CarolDuhart2
They are running away from the gunz. Doors can be blown off, we’ve had video games since the 80, and Columbine happened in the late 90’s. Spanking a 15 year old for wearing a trenchcoat was going to keep him from shooting up the school? Pray, how?
These things never happened because nobody had these weapons in their house, and kids didn’t have the access to buy them either-no money. So we spent some turbulent decades-60’s to 80’s-without school shootings. Even bombings were limited to college campuses where older students could at least get materials. High schools were immune from both. We worried more about fire, tornadoes, and even nuclear bombs than some other student coming in and shooting up the school.
Dnfree
@Baud: you can funnel kids in through a single entrance, but what would stop a student from letting another student in a fire exit door?
Baud
@Suzanne:
Soon: The liberals made us remove all the doors.
mai naem mobile
Isnt Patrick the one who was a RW talk show host before becoming Lieutenant Governor? Or am I confusing him with some other RWNJ elected official?
Mary G
So the shooter will just shoot the crowd of kids waiting to get through the one or two doors. Or in a movie theater, at the mall, a concert, a sporting event, etc. etc. etc.
The NRA will probably ding his report card for daring to suggest that people who own guns should lock them up – “That constrains ma FREEDUM, man.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Well, now we know why Texans think so highly of GW Bush.
Cermet
This guy must play D&D – they have one way only doors; looks to be only as much fantasy as the average amerikan gun nut believes in, anyway.
Baud
@Dnfree:
I don’t know. It’s not my plan. My expertise is with one way doors. Not school safety.
HeleninEire
@Baud: I am seriously loving the three door kiddie door. But it needs a doggie door too. Then it would be complete.
Anonymous37
Look, John. I distinctly remember when you used the word “clip” when you should have written “magazine”.
Therefore, you have zero credibility when it comes to discussions about guns, and I think that everyone should view your claim to have served in the military with extreme suspicion, to say the least.
(I will use a sarcasm tag when people shove it into my cold, dead hands.)
Wag
Davi Frum (yes, I know, he’s a Bush era war monger that deserves Giymo for his whole Axis of Evil shtick) has an excellent piece in the Atlantic about what to blame for this situation. It’s The Guns. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/its-the-guns/560771/
Hard to believe that I’m agreeing with him, but it’s a good piece.
Baud
I think I will make he Department of Doors a Cabinet level agency in my administration.
Suzanne
@Dnfree:
We make doors that release only upon activation of fire alarms, or doors that open only after 30 seconds after being activated, etc etc etc. There’s a number of solutions for that scenario.
MoeLarryAndJesus
What is it about Texas that makes people dumber than people in most other places?
smintheus
@Baud:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/78758/how-did-saloons-old-west-lock-their-doors-night
Ruckus
I wonder when conservatism will rate an entry in the DSM?
Ocotillo
@mai naem mobile:
One in the same. I should be embarrassed the state saw fit to elect such a moran but than I recall the whole damn country (thanks electoral college) elected a reality television star. The stupid, it burns.
Baud
@smintheus: Are you vying for the position of Secretary of Doors in my administration?
SiubhanDuinne
@John: Thread title is a nice, subtle, clever take on Up the Down Staircase.
Schlemazel
We Asked A Mass Shooter Why The Hell This Keeps Happening
This is a really well sourced & thought out article on mass killers
The fact it is on a humor site depresses me more than words can tell. This is the sort of thought piece the WaHoPo or NewHo Times should be publishing, not ‘Cracked’
MattF
Doors! Windows! Hallways! Why do people keep dying when you shoot them? So many unfathomable mysteries.
Nicole
@SiubhanDuinne: I thought he was making a reference to “Raspberry Beret.”
matt
We’re reaching the end state of our country where the stupider a person is the more likely it is they will become leader.
Booger
@SiubhanDuinne: OMG It’s Zeppelin’s last album.
GregB
Jim Morrison, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek must pay for this tragedy.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: It is the title of a Led Zeppelin album and a lyric from Prince’s song, Raspberry Beret.
The Ancient Randonneur
Abolish the 2nd Amendment.
MattF
@Wag: Yes, there are a half-dozen conservatives who were wrong about Iraq but are right about Trump and right about guns. In the current world, I’ll take allies where I find them.
ETA: Even George Fucking Will. His takedown of Mike Pence was a classic.
JDM
@Suzanne:
Yes, that’s why I was never able to sneak friends into the movie theater via the fire door when I was a kid… oh wait, I did that. So how was THAT possible?
Schlemazel
@MattF:
In this case, yes. But I will never trust those ‘allies’ and will take pains to point out to them they bear some responsibility for our current nightmare
Kirk
@MoeLarryAndJesus: Worse than Florida?
CarolDuhart2
Doors or windows-school shooters can defeat any measure by simply being at school where they are allowed in. They have access to everything and everyone regardless of doors, armed guards, drills, and what have you. The school shooters are current or recently ex-students who have the trust of teachers and school workers. Notice that no school shooter is older than 21 (unless it’s a domestic violence situation and a school worker is the target). And even then, they are trusted partners or co-workers who also have access.
Which also makes the “gun-free zones” accusation a fraud. Adult strangers aren’t invading schools-there’s no money there. Drug dealers used to use school yards as a place of business after school (the reason for the drug-free zones in the first place), but with cellphones there is no need to find a place that junkies could find with ease. Schools were used because unlike apartments and businesses, there were long stretches where nobody was looking out the windows.
its about the gunz.
Frank McCormick
Things to remember about Dan Patrick (from Wikipedia) “Dan Goeb Patrick (born Dannie Scott Goeb;[1] April 4, 1950)[2][3] is an American radio talk show host and politician from Houston, Texas. ”
I blame the Texas Democratic party that someone so stupid is in office. And, my he has such competition for stupidest Texan politician and manages to win hands down each time. And, yet, there he is!
CarolDuhart2
@JDM: Or the back door, or a side window, or being let in by a friend/accomplice, or distracting a guard/usher/whatever.
And of course, nobody knows how to break locks or windows either.
Svensker
@Jeffro:
Nope. We have no doors in the schools in Canada. That way, no one gets in and no one gets hurt. Genius, eh?!
jayjaybear
@MoeLarryAndJesus: Critical Mass. There’s so MANY of them in the state…
Doug R
@Baud: Fire code and any door can be held open or ajar to allow someone back in. An alarm is fine, but doesn’t fix the problem of shooters hiding their guns and escaping and a door alarm is just one more distraction to the first responders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qshr1aUtpo
The only true one way door is this: http://www.securitybarriergate.com/photo/securitybarriergate/editor/20160131165141_47208.jpg
Mike in NC
I have a friend in New Orleans who likes to say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity”.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thanks for that. I had no idea. Learn something new every day, as we used to say back in the onion-on-belt-wearing times.
But I’d be willing to bet that both Prince and Led Zeppelin were riffing on either the Bel Kaufman book or the Sandy Dennis film based on it.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne:
JPL
It has been decades since my sons attended school in TX, but way back then most doors were locked during the day with only one entrance open. For fire safety you could exit the building through the other doors. I wonder if Patrick sends his children to private school. hmmm
Doug R
@Suzanne:
Just what overwhelmed first responders need-more noise.
CarolDuhart2
@Doug R: We already have alarmed fire doors and other doors. What we don’t have is a way to figure out who school shooters are among the current and recent population. And even if we did, keep them from getting in when they are supposed to be there (mandatory attendance).
SiubhanDuinne
@Major Major Major Major:
I have seen opera sets like this. In fairness, though, they didn’t take place in a school.
Doug R
@JDM:
I remember talking with theater managment back in the day-there was a light on a panel that would go on-He explained it was the fire exit door and that people would leave it open to sneak back in. I got the impression they concentrated on cracking down for the prime time shows, also most of their revenue came from concessions anyway.
sukabi
@MoeLarryAndJesus: heat and Bullshit?
SiubhanDuinne
@Svensker:
I attended Grade 6 in Regina, and can attest that this is twue.
Doug R
@SiubhanDuinne: Explains Roughrider fans.
BC in Illinois
@The Ancient Randonneur:
But it addresses such a current issue!
(Or have we already acquiesced . . . and allowed for the continuation of a permanent, standing army?)
MoeLarryAndJesus
@Kirk: Hell yes worse than Florida. Texas is where brain cells go to die.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@jayjaybear: That may well be.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@Frank McCormick: You blame the Democrats for Patrick?
That’s some Texas-level dumbassery right there.
TriassicSands
Let’s see, we’re already hiring many of the wrong people as police officers. Now, I guess we should base teacher hiring on marksmanship. Or maybe we could just hire as teachers the police officers who have lost their jobs for using excessive force.
TriassicSands
I’ve always been interested in hearing what the plan is for securing teachers’ guns inside schools. One retired pro-gun teacher told me he’d lock it in his desk. Well, I guess we know where school shooters will get their guns in the future.
A gun safe in every classroom? Let’s see, if we eliminate art and music classes we should able to afford gun safes. But that will only work for schools that haven’t already eliminated those classes.
Viva BrisVegas
@The Ancient Randonneur:
Or maybe just read the whole Amendment as it is written and not give it the Scalia creative “reinterpretation”.
Where you split the single sentence into two parts and pretend the first part has no meaning.
Suzanne
@JDM:
It was possible because they weren’t trying all that hard to keep you from doing it.
I design hospitals, including psychiatric hospitals, where security is of the utmost importance for keeping patients in and for keeping contraband and potentially angry associates out. We have a variety of design strategies that we use that aren’t really in place in schools or movie theaters, including sallyports on every fire exit, fail secure hardware, etc. I mean, at the root of it, anything could be defeated, Mission Impossible-style, but the technology and products exist to deal with the problem you name.
The question isn’t “could we design and operate a building that would prevent a shooter from getting in?”. The question is more if it would make a terrible learning environment, or if we would ever be willing to spend the money to build and operate it.
Just One More Canuck
@Doug R: nothing explains Roughrider fans
http://montrealgazette.com/sports/why-the-watermelons
Suzanne
@Doug R:
Sometimes the alarms are silent, depending on the type of facility.
We also compartmentalize hospitals and other buildings like airports, which we don’t do in schools. Maybe we should.
afanasia
@Nicole: Me too. ?
No Drought No More
NY Times: “The special counsel plans to finish by Sept. 1 the investigation into whether President Trump obstructed the Russia inquiry, according to the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said on Sunday that waiting any longer would risk improperly influencing voters in the midterm elections in November”.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight.
Americans must wait patiently for elections to unfold prior to the senate voting on a nominee to the Supreme Court, but must also rush to judgment any investigation of a national, or even historical import, simply because it too might influence an election.
Over the past few weeks, democratic congressmen Schiff, Lieu, Swalwell, and Thompson have in turn each advised me that any talk of impeachment prior to November is incredibly ill advised, for the sake of both the party and country.
The democratic congressmen are profoundly wrong. All are upright men operating in good faith, I believe, but their advice on this matter can only be characterized as chickenshit in the extreme, and unworthy of a party that aspires to lead America.
It would have paid the party and congressional democrats great political dividends had they squawked loud and clear when the criminal nature of the War in Iraq was first discerned as a plot (say, by the time GW “searched” for WMD’s in that infamous video). Or ten years later, with Obama at the helm, it would have paid great dividends to have refused to go quietly, to have incessantly called out the bad faith subterfuge of the GOP for what it portended- especially during the 2016 campaign- as the republican party had shattered two party norms, for the sake a power play to secure a Supreme Court seat sympathetic to its brand of American fascism.
Those people will never stop. If democrats have learned one lesson since 9/11, it is that republicans will not stop; they must be stopped. Democratic representatives must lead that charge, the rank and file is right to accept no less. And if they do not, or can not, what the hell good are they for?
I believe the rank and file is sick to death with coddling the escalating insensibilities the republican party, and certainly the call to quell talk of impeachment rates as such. So let’s hope Schiff, Lieu, Swalwell, and Thompson wise-up a lot sooner than November, and reconsider their bad advice as being in keeping with the same timid mentality that ran America into the ditch we’re now in.
For crying out loud, how much fatter do the republican fish in the barrel have to get before those four will be willing to pull the trigger?
MobiusKlein
My kids had ‘portables’ for classrooms. Perhaps getting real buildings should be higher priority than making every school a fortress.
P-dog
Take a breath folks.
40-50 years ago — maybe even as recent as 30 years ago — many schools had rifle teams, and it was common to bring guns to school. Hell, even if there was no rifle team, students would bring guns to schools (and sometimes keep them in their lockers!), and then go hunting after school. Yet there were no mass school shootings, school shootings is a recent phenomenon. This should tell you #1, that it REALLY isn’t quite about the guns. Something’s changed in our attitudes towards each other as human beings, and something’s definitely changed in how the media covers these topics like the frenzied buzzards they are. (Please spare me that “they didn’t have ARs back then!” — the AR has been around since the 1960’s in the civilian market, and semi-autos in general are century-old technology. Please also note this most recent school shooting was conducted with a pump action shotgun and a revolver — are you proposing to ban those too? )
Look, I’m not necessarily on board with the suggestion we have to change the design of every school in America for this silly door thing. There’s probably better ways to protect schools than do that. But I also am not delusional in thinking that we can get rid of the 2nd amendment, or that we can ban-guns our way to safety. The genie is out of the bottle for that, there’s 400 million guns in this nation, probably billions of high capacity magazines, you’re never going to remove enough guns from circulation to make even a minor dent in crime. If there’s any solace, it’s to know that even with the millions of guns in circulation, our overall gun crime and gun murder rates have decreased since the highs of the 90s. This was during a time when the number of guns in circulation more than doubled. Again, that should tell you that the guns aren’t necessarily the problem. This is why I think the energy devoted to hating guns, the NRA, and by extension, gun owners, is misguided. It’s better to come up with solutions that work within the acceptance that we have these millions guns in our country, ownership is indeed a civil right, and the question should be how do we provide safety within such a framework of having an armed society.
boatboy_srq
@P-dog: You could have left it at “faux journalism and pseudoXtianist preacherdom need to stop Othering people and making it easier/desirable to solve ones problems with violence.” But that would kill the entire Reichwing, 2A or no 2A.
P-dog
@boatboy_srq:
I don’t understand what you’re trying to suggest. I’m not on the side of the right, nor do I consider myself a leftist (anymore). What I did say is that it’s a waste of time to engage in Orwellian 2-minute hate sessions on guns/NRA/gun owners. The first problem with this approach is that you do it at your own peril. Say what you want about gun owners, they vote a helluva lot more consistently on this one topic than other kinds of voters. You saw that in 1994, and you may see it again in 2018, reversing a possible blue wave. The other drawback is that if all you’re trying to do is punish gun owners, you do NOTHING about solving actual gun crime issues.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@P-dog –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
Unfortunately accidental and deliberate shootings at schools is not a new phenomenon. Improvements in weapon design and accuracy have however made them more deadly. What is making them more common I could not say, although banning guns and having much stricter gun ownership laws and background checks would be a start at ending the number of school shootings.
Not to mention that the vast majority of children killed by guns are not killed in mass shootings. And many are killed or injured by guns in their own (or a friends) homes, for example: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/14/1658351/–The-new-National-Pastime-GunFAIL-CCXLIV
“Eighteen people accidentally shot themselves during the week of April 30-May 6. And 16 kids were accidentally shot. And of course, there was the usual range of other kinds of accidents: hunting accidents, target shooting accidents, the mistaking of friends and family members for intruders, accidental discharges while cleaning a still-loaded gun, etc. But if there’s anything that stood out about this week, it was perhaps the number of accidents (or “accidents”) that arose from activity that everyone involved really should have known was wrong and/or stupid from the beginning.”
P-dog
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Please look what I said: Mass school shootings is a new phenomenon. The list contains plenty of suicides and accidents, or perhaps single acts of vengaence in the 20th century, and aside from Charles Whitman and Edward Allaway, we do not have any regular spat of mass school shootings until well into the 1980’s and beyond. The list of incidents in the mid 20th century are also few and far between, usually less than one occurrence per two or three years.
— “Improvements in weapon design and accuracy have however made them more deadly”. This is hogwash. The lethality of any mass shooting is almost always dependent on the intent of the shooter, and also the response time it takes to neutralize the perpetrator. This is why we can have Charles Whitman kill 17 people with simply a bolt action rifle, and likewise have Cho Seung Hui kill the most number of people in a mass school shooting with nothing but a 9mm and a 22LR. The bolt action rifle is well over 100 years old. Perhaps Hui’s Glock & Walther might be of a slightly newer design, but his cartridges (9mm/22LR) are both over a century old. If he used a 1911, it really wouldn’t have changed the outcome too much. The long response time in both cases (More than 1 hour for Whitman, and well over 10 minutes for Hui) is the reason. This likely is also the case as to why the fatality count was so high in Orlando, as it took more than 1 hour to neutralize Mateen — people who might have survived if the SWAT team merged in faster bled out in that hour.
It’s odd that you would want to bring up the accidental death rate from guns. While each accident is indeed a tragedy, the accidental rate has declined to century lows — every year there are generally less than 700 deaths from neglience, and that’s for all age brackets. If you want to talk about the tragedy of young children dying from negligent discharges, it should be noted that more young children drown in swimming pools and bathtubs than die by guns. Gun owners are starting to “own up” and be more responsible, I wonder when pool owners will do the same.
So having said all this, what is your point? Do you have actual suggestions about what to do in schools and gun crime, are you just trying to paint that guns are scary and evil?