teacher carry protecting students
courtesy improb.com

Finally. Logical talk about protecting students from a school principal:

Should an armed intruder ever get onto the campus of Manatee School for the Arts in Palmetto, they will not have [a] fair fight on their hands. They, according to Principal Bill Jones, will be met with swift, overwhelming and deadly force by guards carrying semi-automatic rifles.

“If someone walks onto this campus, they’re going to be shot and killed,” [Manatee School for the Arts Principal Bill] Jones said. “We’re not going to talk with them. We’re not going to negotiate. We are going to put them down, as quickly as possible.”

– Tiffany Tompkins for Bradenton.com, Palmetto Principal has a Warning for School Shooters

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47 COMMENTS

    • That was my first thought, why do the students need to be protected from the principal?

        • If you look very close at that pictured AR you can actually see some empty spots on the rails. They are hard to see but they are there. Better get more stuff on the rails or I might not think Principal Bill is a real operator.

        • Yes, when you run out of ammo you can bludgeon the perp to death with that AR! Deadlier that being shot I’m guessing.

      • I see these types of grammatical errors every day. The Democrats have controlled public education with an iron grip for the last 60 years. Students are pushed ahead whether they learn anything or not.

        Nobody knows anything when they get out, except that the US and Israel have no right to exist, and that all troubles worldwide are caused by white men (not fat white men, they are victims,) and capitalism.

        The phrase should read: “Logical talk from a school principal about protecting students.”

        I was a teacher for five years; that’s all I could stand.

        • I’m sick to death of reading error-laden articles published at (ostensibly) professional online outlets. I’m so sick of it, in fact, that I have a personal policy: when I encounter egregiously stupid mistakes in online articles, I just stop reading. I don’t care who wrote it, and I don’t care how much I agree with them. If they can’t be bothered to proofread and edit, I certainly can’t be bothered to wade through their murky sea of misplaced commas, run-on sentences, subject confusions, and misspellings.

          Not to mention that editing a 100 word article, 90 words of which are quoted from someone else, simply doesn’t take very long. Might as well bother tuning up the ONE sentence you wrote yourself.

        • I was going to rewrite that phrase exactly as you did, Steve, and for the same reason. Then, you did a better job job of explaining the root problem than I could have done. Thanks. Should we ever meet, first round will be on me.

        • Steve, read Stienbeck and Hemingway. Two of my favorite writers. Twain is another good one . prefer American authors to those snooty European ones. Anyway, they’ve been edited for you. We’re just a bunch of good old boys and girls. Read us and you’ll just have to put up with grammatical errors. Wait! Was that proper English?

        • Our local paper just hired a graduate of Arkansas Sate – Jonesboro, with a degree in Mass Communications, emphasis on Print Journalism, to be the editor of our weekly publication. For fun, my kids critique her articles for all of the continuity, grammar, and punctuation errors. They are so common and prevalent, I can only believe they hired her at a discount rate. Entire articles are written with barley a complete sentence, or a sentence that doesn’t contain some sort of error. I’d be embarrassed to put my name on anything she writes. Unfortunately, parents have to supplement English and written communications courses throughout their children’s’ schooling. The girls, a part of the cheer leading squads for their years in high school, were often asked by written request to being “store-boughten” cookies for special occasions. I know the nuns and priests who taught me sentence structure, nouns, verbs, adjectives, dangling participles, and the proper use of the Oxford Comma, are all rolling in their graves at the state of our children’s grammar and English education. In addition to Liberal education, I blame text messaging, Twitter, and other forms of social media too.

        • I have a theory about the edit button.

          TTAG basically gets paid in “clicks”. Every post is a click, but not every edit. the simple math is as follows. [two posts > a post and an edit.] So GOODBYE edit button, and HELLO more money…..

        • @Carrucan

          I enjoy barley with my articles too 🤣

          It is pretty bad out there. Takes away from the writer’s message to be sure.

        • @ Wood. “Hoist with his own petard” comes to mind. I’d edit if I could. Looked good when writing it.

  3. Since I taught in the public ed cesspool for 40 years, I love that this is happening in a “School for the Arts”. Of course, in keeping with the Arts background, the rent-a-cops will only have semiauto rifles. And this: ““If someone walks onto this campus, they’re going to be shot and killed,” [Manatee School for the Arts Principal Bill] Jones said.” Maybe if they danced onto the campus they’d survive. WTF? Appears there’s only so much “education” one could expect from an administrator in a public school.

    Still, I’d hate to see what’d happen to the twerp who came [armed?] into the Palmetto Vocational School.

    • The intended audience of those remarks are for locally troubled individuals who now know what to expect if they attempt anything stupid there. It wasn’t necessarily meant to make national headlines. I like his strategy of alerting folks that his school is a bit more of a hardened target compared to most others. He’s potentially stopping a tragedy beforehand without firing a shot. I like it.

      • Potentially stopping a tragedy? I doubt it. He will perhaps convince the evil doers to pick a different school, as there are plenty of others protected by nothing more than rainbows and unicorn farts.

        • Well that’s his job. To protect his school and kids. If others want to be an easy target, that’s not his problem. Perhaps those utopian schools that may be an alternative target should have the parents insist on similar precautions. Once word gets out about this, I would bet his school won’t be the one getting shot up.

  4. So, the psycho will just have to go to the next school district over that has gun-free zones. I can’t save the world, but I can save my little piece of it.

    • Works for me. If everybody protects his little part, the only losses will be snowflakes who refuse protection.

  5. If you read the article, Principal Jones initially refers to an “armed intruder” specifically. As quoted above it sounds like “someone”/anyone that walks onto the Campus is in peril of being shot on sight. Reading the cited News article from the BRADENTON HERALD clarifies that more research and thought was put into this School’s strong stance than the TTAG writer implied in their post.

  7. Good for his student’s…at my kid’s old high school I saw armed guard’s kicking the he!! out of a black yout. No shooting’s there that I know of. IOW this ain’t unusual…

    • Aaron,

      Oh, good point: I cannot count how many times gun-grabbers have promised that parent-teacher conferences will lead to gunfights because of heated exchanges over troubled students.

      I hope all teachers in that school district are wearing ballistic resistant vests now.

  9. But, but, but, … we can’t have this! It means the world is NOT unicorns and rainbows! It is better to let innocent students die in pursuit of the ILLUSION that the world is unicorns and rainbows than to see — SEE I TELL YOU! — people with rifles on campus!!! Ahhhhhh!!!!!!!

    /end_sarcasm

    • Given the unlikelihood of actually ever being in a school shooting this is the opposite extreme. There are undoubtedly numerous other ways to beef up securing our children in school that don’t include armed security toting Bullpups around with them all of the time.

  10. Better than most schools, but won’t stop a shooter who finds a nice sniper hide within 500yds in one of the many surrounding buildings or wooded areas. A couple of which are high ground with a good view of the entire school. Check it out on Google Earth.

    • GunnyGene,

      No measure will ensure zero casualties since attackers ALWAYS have the element of surprise and get to choose the time and method of their attack.

      As for a deranged punk who wants his name on the news, exceedingly few of them will acquire the necessary skills to reliably shoot people from 500 yards away. More importantly, such a scumbag would NOT be able to rack up a huge body count shooting from so far away unless students happened to be in a tight group and more than 200 yards from cover — which pretty much will never happen.

      • Never say never. I’ll agree re: “deranged punk”. But nobody thought something like Las Vegas would ever happen either. The question that hasn’t been answered is how far out can, or should, a school or other potential soft target place their perimeter security? Presently, it’s at the property line or the exterior building walls. Maybe that’s gudnuf, maybe it ain’t. We’ll probably find out which within a couple years.

    • Most people especially the type to shoot up a school could not hit a bus at 500 yards.Actual weapons are not like the video games.

      • In the real world you have to allow for ballistic trajectories. In video games, most have bullets travelling in straight lines.

  11. Back when America was still America, a student could just go out to their car or truck & grab their hunting rifle & take care of business themselves..,

  12. Academically (no pun intended) speaking, what would be the most appropriate weapon for school-based guardians? I was thinking of a pistol round carbine (with JHP ammo) to avoid over -penetration but then I realized that some shooters will wear (and have worn) body armor. Then I thought about the FN-90 5.7 X 28 with HP sprinkled with steel core ammo in the 50 round mag. But that would go back to over-penetration. Hmmm. What would be a “happy medium”?

  14. Overkill, it doesn’t send a message, it sends several some of which are negative and it also probably sounds like a dare to some deranged angry teenager. With their higher fencing and other security measures they’re turning the school into a prison. I’m sorry, but as much as I like the idea of armed teachers and security protecting my kids when they’re in the classroom, the thought of walking down the halls of my kid’s school and passing bull-pup carrying guards is disconcerting to say the least.

    A more subtle approach is probably better given the statistically astronomical unlikelihood that you would be in a school shooting. Manny’s comment about the FN 5.7, even in handgun format, in well trained experienced hands is going to equal to or even superior to an untrained teenager with a $500 AR from Walmart. Even if they had the bullpups locked up and readily accessible and ran lock down drills with them once or twice year while the student body was present would be just as effective as a deterrent.

    Basically what I’m saying is this is the opposite extreme of no armed security.

  15. I appreciate his enthusiasm and desire to go all in but it does seems a bit excessive. Two patrolling guards wearing plate armor vests, carrying Kel-Tec RDB Bullpups and (SHUDDER) Glocks as they constantly patrol school grounds? These guys will be bored to tears.

    Good idea to hire veterans though. Always approve of hiring vets!

    They are building it anyway so put one armed guard in that guard shack. Build it to stop rifle fire. Put the other in a bullet protected security room in the school where all the camera feeds are monitored. There, element of surprise or not, now an attacker will alert the entire school and not be able to just shoot the guard in the back of the head as he does his patrol.

    Upgrade all classrooms to have doors that will lock and bolt at four points. Just like in my house, hell, it was cheap! Home Depot stuff!

    The fencing and electronic gates and doors are a good idea too.

    Do all classrooms have blinds that can be closed so a shooter cannot aim thru the windows?

    The Kel-Tec RDB’s are an interesting choice for the guards to have in their gun racks. No complaint with it.

    Don’t need to worry about all the teachers or no teachers being armed. Just a couple will do. Recruit a couple with the desire and aptitude and pay for the training and regular practice, annual certification.

    And do lose those damned Glocks and buy some real American guns already.

    • There’s a good chance, even probable, that those rifles were donated. Kel-Tec is a Florida company. I’m sure there’s a relationship there.

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