in my experience

Going up against someone with an AR-15 is when most cops call in the SWAT team

It is not impossible to use a pistol to stop someone with an AR-15 but the odds heavily favor the person with the AR-15 in a gunfight.

The .357 magnum handgun round is a very powerful (one can kill black bears with it) caliber but revolvers that fire the round have only 5 or 6 bullets in the cylinder while a semi-automatic rifle can have 30 or even more in a magazine. There are pistols that hold 15 to 20 rounds in a magazine but that's still short of the rifle.

Rifles have the advantage at long distances in accuracy and power of the projectile (more energy and higher velocity) but that advantage is negated within buildings.

It's easier to maneuver within a building armed with a handgun then with a rifle. Consider shooting around a corner. A person with a handgun needs to just expose the shooting hand and enough of the head to aim and fire while a person with a rifle has to expose more of his body to shoot around a corner as the rifle requires two hands to aim and fire.

Its a VERY heavy handgun, It takes both hands to handle that bad boy. Trust me.

Here's a video of a guy shooting a .357 one handed.

I train firing the gun with the dominant hand firing and the weak hand supporting, firing with the weak hand and the dominant hand supporting, with just the dominant hand and just the weak hand. I and many others do this because one will not always be in a good firing position.

If you are restricted to firing your .357 with both hands, it may be too powerful for you and you may want to consider downsizing to a .38 Special firing standard pressure rounds.

Hate to burst your bubble.

Whether it be my .357, my 45, or 380 or my .38 which is the only one I could be pretty accurate with one hand. Its just the way I was taught 50 or so years ago. Its just natural now, Hard to explain. BUT, If youre pretty accurate with a .357 with one hand more power to ya. BTW, what load are you using in your rig?

While I practice shooting more for home defense situations. I make my own center of mass targets out of cardboard with a 12W"X18H" oval shape target drawn on the cardboard with a 3"WX5"H index card sized target drawn in the middle of the oval target. I fire at this target at a range of 7 yards and I use strips of duct tape to cover holes.

Using two hands, I strive for the index card size target and can consistently hit that. The 12"X18" target is used single hand shooting. This is with the .357 magnum.

I train mostly using two hands firing with the dominant but I also practice using two hands firing with the weak hand and firing single handed.

158 grain JSP is the ammo I usually use.

Well said. I've shot them and the .44. 'Cannon' is a great word for the experience. Lots of power. The .44 darn near went through an old engine block.

With a rifle, we used to shoot the wings off horseflies that liked to check out our paper targets. I could never be that accurate with a pistol. With an AR-15 in a school, with the increased velocity of that bullet and no wind, heavy odds are, only one shot is needed to take out a shooter. With a .357, one has to get closer where they can be more easily shot and just like a street cop with a handgun, there is a greater chance they will miss him - not good with kids around.

As for shooting around a corner with a pistol, an AR-15's first bullet probably won't make it through concrete block but a second or third or fourth around the same spot could. If one empties a 30 round magazine into that corner the person with the pistol is hiding behind, they have a good chance of taking the person with the pistol out. Under that kind of fire, the person with the pistol is not going to show themselves or they'll be shot. That's frightening firepower advantage in close quarters. You have nowhere absolutely safe to hide.

A place where our gun group shot was on a farmer's property surrounded by hills so a bullet could not get away. One day he asked us if we could help him trim back a big hunk of forest that had grown into a field. There were four of us. Someone had brought metal cases of .30x. We used assault rifles - I can't remember if it was AK47s, Nato FNs or combinations. We opened up on that forest and it just fell over. We were done in about 5-10 minutes. If we tried that with .357s we would have been there all weekend and then some doing a tree at a time. The firepower of these assault rifles is jaw dropping if you are not used to them. And disgustingly sick to imagine them being used against children.

Whether it's going house to house in combat or a SWAT team in the city, you do not see a lot of pistols drawn with those guys.

One AR-15 shooter vs 20 cops with handguns ... most outcomes may well get the shooter but you're going to have a lot of dead cops. One AR-15 shooter vs 20 cops with AR-15s - virtually all outcomes result in stopping the shooter with far fewer dead cops.

If I was a teacher, I'd contemplate wanting to have a gun around after all that has gone on. I'd be thinking I could help out in such circumstances and fairly confident I could. But if the cops show up and I'm running around the school with an AR-15, how do they know I'm not the shooter? It's chaos. You arm a bunch of teachers and you are introducing an element of confusion for law enforcement. A bunch of the teachers will die the hard way finding out how disadvantaged a hand gun is against such firepower.

It may take decades but I think we need to curtail or get rid of these assault rifles. They're not meant for hunting - they're designed for killing people. And we need mental health checks for folks acquiring guns.

As with most studies, unless you look at the details the conclusion's click bait. If you like the conclusion, then you fill in the details necessary to make the conclusion a cogent part of your argument ... even if the details aren't the same as in the study. Context matters.

Where was the gunfight? Outside? In a hallway? Was there a rifle involved? On one side or both? Did the police use handguns? Did the police have cover? Were they 20 feet away or 100 feet away or 500 feet away?

Was the assailant in a safe place at the time, or standing in the open and unprotected? Was their brush around?

Is it 20% of police or 20% of the bullets?

The "80% that miss"--what caliber? Frangible? Steel jacketed?

Were there other people around, or was this a staged scenario? If around, were they running away and not close to the target? Behind a sheetrock wall directly behind the target? Behind a cinder-block wall behind the target? Held in front of the target? Assuming, of course, that the presence of civilians would matter when deciding to either take a single shot or emptying 2 magazines at the target.

You can see how these conditions matter.

The only schools I've heard of allowing teachers to carry firearms in school required additional training beyond what many police have and also required frangible bullets. Apparently the dress code didn't include jeans + t-shirts as possible garb, but required more clothing for the teachers overall.

Not saying that this is a good idea. But am saying that the conditions that it's been implemented in are very specific, and those specific conditions have to be taken into account when evaluating the original proposal. Because, again, context matters.

and the teachers are volunteers in the program and they get additional training.

Some people are acting like districts are going to force second grade teachers who never touched a gun in their life to start carrying handguns in class.

Butler County (OH) (Cincy suburb) just offered a program for free "CCW" training for teachers who were interested.

They quit taking applications after 300 people signed up.

or otherwise react to whoever just shot at them. It takes the initiative away from the shooter if they're reacting to a situation rather than instigating every confrontation themselves.

A 3rd party doesn't need to end the engagement, just prolong the situation and slow down the firefight until backup arrives.

it will slow his movements as he won't know if there's someone waiting to shoot him at every corner.

Or you can post a big sign that says "Gun Free Zone" so he can walk freely through the school shooting people confident that no one can shoot back at him.

Does it matter?

Larger magazines, longer barrels, collapsible stocks, burst fire mode. The 9 mm round is less likely to penetrate walls. The size and longer sighting plane make shooting more accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_MP5

First, if your argument is that unless you can have 100% perfect accuracy you shouldn’t act then that means you don’t want the police to try and stop them either, and they should just leave the killers to do anything they want to avoid the chance of missing them.

Is that what you are saying?

Of course not.

Well, a miss from a teacher would be no different than a miss from a cop, so there is no reason to say one is a reason to avoid ever trying but the other is acceptable.

The hard truth is that once things are to that point there is no perfect answer. Any action you take has the unintended consequences possible like a missed round going somewhere bad.

So yeah, that’s possible.

And a miss that hits a student would be horrible.

But as horrible as that would be, it is still preferable to doing nothing during that same time period and letting the killer keep up the killing unopposed.
Because if your firing a shot and even if it misses it means you just fought back and brought armed resistance to the shooter.

And the only thing that matters, once they start, is how fast you can get armed resistance to them.

Because once you get armed resistance to they one of 4 things happens:
They surrender/try to flee
They commit suicide
They get shot
They change focus from trying to kill innocents to trying to kill the person/persons who are coming after them.

And no matter what, that means they stopped killing the innocent victims.

So the answer is that the risk of a missed round doing damage you don’t want is real, but it’s a far, far, far better choice to accept that risk and act than it is to refuse to do anything and let the killer kill unopposed for much longer.

There is no perfect choice. If you are saying nobody should act if there is any chance of a missed round doing damage than you are saying that nobody should intervene at all and the killer should be left to kill as long as they want. That’s what the police did at Columbine, and the lesson was learned there that it’s the exact wrong choice. That is why officers are supposed to move in as fast as possible now and make contact with a shooter as fast as they can so they can stop the killing.

Now, I know what your next statement probably will be- but cops are better trained.

In reality in most states a new rookie cop that has finished their training will have only about 80 hours of training in firearms and firearms tactics, and then most get 4-8 hours a year more unless they end up in SWAT or other specialized teams that not all areas even have.

And that 80 hours is pistol and rifle/shotgun and in a lot of different scenarios many invoking shooting in/around/into cars and other things not needed in this case.

I could easily take a teacher with some basic knowledge of firearms and in a one week class have them as equally trained and competent to handle that firearm in a scenario like this as those responding officers would be. And actually in some ways more qualified since they will have much better knowledge of the building.

To underscore that, the Federal Flight Deck Officer program that trains pilots to carry guns is only 6 days long. In 6 days they get them qualified to use a handgun on an aircraft in flight full of people.

Like "death taxes" and "repeal and replace", Republicans throw out these stupid soundbites instead of actual policy prescriptions.

(sarcasm thingie)