well arent you guys a bunch of smart motherfuckers.

no seriously.you guys are some smart motherfuckers.

there is such a thing as elementary morality.
just ask a child.they will tell you.
now there are institutions and religions who will attempt to sway your morality to align with theirs but thats just a series of levers for control.

ya know.
speaking on a personal level.for every kid i meet that is absolutely clueless i meet guys like you two.
this gives me hope.
you two stay awesome.

When I was in elementary school, science class included making fun of "old wives tales" as emblematic of superstition.

There was an "old wives tale" that moldy bread could cure a fever.

If only those early scientists had been more curious and less dismissive, we might have had penicillin much much sooner.

Of course, then we would have had penicillin resistant bugs much sooner, too...

HAHAHA, Oh man, i swear I have heard it played just like that by many a high school and elementary school band.

We did this puzzle in elementary school in the GATE program. How on earth people aren't taught, amazed, and remembering this simple but awesome geometrical illusion is beyond me. First thing you see when you try to recreate it on a grid, is that there is missing diagonal space. People miss the missing space isn't using the same modular shape as the rest of the puzzle. Easy to detect on a grid using only a triangle.

I think programming would be a good thing to teach elementary aged kids, but not as a means toward making them programmers or software engineers. Rather it should be a tool used to teach general problem solving techniques. I haven't used any seriously, but I have seen some clever learning 'languages' that involve dragging and dropping images of procedures or actions, and then connecting them up to make a program that does something.(Scratch, I believe is a popular example). I think this is good stuff. Kids that find it particularly satisfying, should be given the option to move on to more traditional programming languages and follow that course of study.

Personally, I love programming. I get a huge kick out of it, and even when it's going badly, I'm still enjoying myself despite the frustration. I think of it as "building machines out of ideas," which is awesome. This is hardly true of everyone (even among many of my former Computer Engineering classmates who were just there because it's a solid-choice, job-prospect wise), and I definitely don't think it should be pushed as some sort of curriculum requirement.

Probably like most people in the field, I started out when I was 11 or 12 wanting to write video games, so taught myself C and assembler(which was necessary at the time). The desire to write video games faded before too long, but my love of programming continued on. This was all extra-curricicular, though, and actually in many ways was detrimental to my other studies, which I found tremendously boring. Had I been given the option earlier to follow a CS/SE/CE type curriculum primarily, I probably would have had a much happier early-schooling experience.

I understand schools in the UK tend to follow a more vocational educational arc, whereby you specialize earlier. I find the pigeonholing nature of that a little concerning (so far as I understand it), but it's better than everybody getting the same bland, little-bit-of-everything approach US public schools use.

It's very hard to accidentally kill someone with a fire extinguisher. But I'm sure someone is going to go into an elementary school and massacre children with one very soon.

Amazing the lengths people will go to to protect their toys.

When they say programming isn't being taught in 90% of US schools, are they counting all the elementaries and giving them the same weight as high schools with 10X the number of students? I just can't imagine most high schools don't offer optional programming classes.

http://thejournal.com/Articles/2009/08/04/Computer-Science-Courses-on-the-Decline.aspx?Page=1

I remember going to GO training Schools after my regular elementary school. It was fun at first but later on all I end up doing was play '5 connect' on the GO board

HA!
moral ambiguity is the realm of the lazy and narcissistic.
picking from the ripened fruits of cynicism.
there IS such a thing as elementary morality.
it does exist and most of us are aware of it on an almost instinctual level.
the intent is the key to unlock the conundrum,not the outcome.
*promote

Not a stretch at all:

http://www.news-press.com/article/20130117/NEWS0104/301170028/10-resource-officers-begin-patrol-Lee-County-elementary-schools

http://www.nasro.org/

They are armed guards.

I was a big fan of VR when it was the new thing in the 90's, even wrote a school paper on it (so what if it was just elementary school I really hope this type of tech is supported by more engines (Epic, Valve, Id, Unity, and published in-house) because I want more of this!

@dystopianfutetoday
excellent question and is exactly where the discussion should be.

understand i am not against regulations i.e:background checks,licenses etc etc
i also think a gun safety course should be mandatory.responsible gun safety is just being a good citizen and neighbor.

have a mental illness with a record of violence? sorry.no guns for you.
convicted of a violent crime? no guns for you either.
but these regulations are already in place and responsible gun owners are..well...responsible.

so where is the argument REALLY centered?
unregulated .or more accurately put: weakly regulated gun shows and who benefits from these gun shows? gun manufacturers.
and where do they get their political clout? NRA.where those who are already blocked from gun purchase can skirt the system and the NRA can hide behind the second amendment.

that sound like a fairly accurate assesment?

now..onto your direct question on the downside of only the police and military being armed.
simply put: i do not trust authority or to be more precise,i do not trust power because power begets more power and seeks only to retain its own power which will always lead to you losing your power of self determination in the end.

america was never designed to have a standing army and their are articles that espouse the ending of the republic if we tried.here we are going on 60 years with a standing army.how is that working out for us?

bush had his illegal wars and surveillence and obama has his assasinations.

the police,which was born from the old town sheriffs were put in place to enforce this new and noble idea america had "all equal under law".a local citizenry trained to enforce the law and protect this "property ownership" another new and novel approach to society.

what do we have now?
defense money being spent on SWAT teams who now have high powered assault weapons and tanks...TANKS!..FFS.

do i really have to make a list?
waco
ruby ridge
the list is not short.

do you see where i am going with this?
i am not speaking about right and wrong.
i am pointing to the hypocrisy.
this is about elementary morality.
i totally agree with you that violence begets violence but if we are going to take away peoples right to own guns then we need to take them away from the police as well.

because just as some seriously damaged people have wrought death and suffering,so to has our very own government officials.
having the power of the government behind their actions does NOT make it more morally acceptable.

on a personal note i find the politicizing of the sandy hook school shooting so fucking despicable and grotesque that i literally shake with rage.this goes out to both sides of this political whoring.
the NRA can go fuck itself with a dirty razor-bladed dildo and the tree-hugging,pussified everybody-wants-to-bugger-my-lil-jonny scaredy cats can go fuck off as well.

i do not carry a gun nor am i interesting in owning one but i will fight for your right to own one.they are a weapon and as such should be monitored and regulated,but they should not be banned due to a giant fear storm and an over-abundance of "what if" pontificating.

who wants to live in a minority report world?not me.
most gun owners are responsible.
most police are good at what they do.
do not let the statistics arguments allow you to give up more of your rights.

but if we are going to protest i will be there with not a single weapon on me.

This is nothing personal against the poster, but that girl is just terrible. I felt like I was watching a weather report from elementary school.

I haven't handled a pistol since 1983 in boot camp. All I need to do in Oregon to get a CCW is watch a video online, take an online test, pay to download the certificate, and take the certificate to the Sheriff's office for my permit. I wouldn't want me carrying a gun in public, but I could if I wanted to, with virtually no experience or training. Now, guns are not my thing. I don't want one. I'm relatively sane, but if I wasn't, if the world was cruel and oppressive and needed a dark knight, getting a CCW would be just as easy.

This video shows simply and clearly that things very often don't go as you plan when you find yourself in a very stressful and scary situation, and that the training required to perform spontaneously and correctly in such situations must be ongoing, something the vast, vast majority of CCW's would be unable or unwilling to do. Would they have performed better had the "drill" happened when they were told it would happen? Maybe, but that isn't how things unfold in RL now, is it? Sometimes it's an elementary school classroom full of six and seven year-olds, or with smoke bombs in a movie theater, or outside the food court at a mall, or even, like this video, in a lecture hall at a school.

So drop the paranoid, ulterior-motive bullshit. "Dubious"? You sound like a child.

On Oct. 1, 1997, Luke Woodham, 16, part of a satanic cult, stabbed and bludgeoned his mother before driving her car to Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss., where he shot dead two students and wounded seven others with a rifle he made no attempt to conceal. He then got back into his mother’s car and planned to go to Pearl Junior High School to kill some more. But assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a .45-caliber pistol from the glove compartment of his truck and subdued Woodham.

On Jan. 16, 2002, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, of Nigeria, went to the Appalachian School of Law campus in Virginia with a handgun and killed three and wounded three others. At the sound of gunfire, two other students – both police officers – retrieved guns from their cars. Meanwhile, another police officer and former Marine jumped Odighizuwa and disarmed him by the time the other officers got to the scene.

On Aug. 23, 1995, a band of crack cocaine addicts entered a store in Muskegon, Mich., with a plan to kill everyone and steal enough cash and jewelry to feed their habit. One member of the gang shot store owner Clare Cooper in the back four times. He still managed to grab his shotgun and fire on the gang as they fled. They were all apprehended.

On Dec. 9, 2007, a 24-year-old gunman named Matthew Murray launched an attack on the congregants of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs that left two victims dead. A former police officer, Jeanne Assam, a member of the security team for the church, shot Murray 10 times, killing him, as he was shooting at her. Murray had killed four others at a church 70 miles away earlier in the day.

On July 24, 2012, Richard Gable Stevens rented a rifle at a shooting range in Santa Clara, Calif., and herded three employees out the door, saying he intended to kill them. One of the employees, however, was carrying a .45-caliber handgun and shot the assailant.

On Dec. 17, 1991, two men armed with stolen pistols herded 20 customers and employees of a Shoney’s restaurant in Anniston, Ala., into a walk-in refrigerator and locked it so they could rob the establishment. However, one customer was armed with a .45-caliber handgun hidden under a table. He shot one of the gunmen dead. The other robber, who was holding the manager of the restaurant at gunpoint, began firing at the customer. But he was wounded critically by return fire, ending the incident.

On July 13, 2009, an armed man entered the Golden Food Market in south Richmond, shooting and wounding a clerk while firing at store patrons. He was shot by another customer who had a concealed-carry permit, likely saving the lives of eight other people in the store.

On July 29, 2012, Charles Conner shot and killed two people and their dogs at the Peach Tree RV park in Early, Texas. Vic Stacy got a call from one of the neighbors, got his .357 magnum and shot Conner as he fired upon the first police officer to arrive at the scene. Stacy was credited with saving the life of the officer.

The truth is that every single day mass murders are averted by armed civilian

Yet, every time there is a horrendous slaughter like we saw at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, there is a knee-jerk outcry for stricter control of guns.

taken from http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/how-to-stop-the-slaughter-of-the-innocents/#oA9kiFClUvLJ8gIK.99