Blog 57 A News Special of the Day (March 14.2018.)
This blog has for the most part avoided the top news topic of the last two years - the classroom behavior of the nation’s most prominent schoolboy. But, without naming him, permit me to make a few observations on his response to the problem of the shooting deaths in our schools. Now I’m not referring to the little though long-standing problem in ghetto schools, but to the big problem of discontented shooters randomly ravaging schools with automatic weapons.
Following the mantra of some NRA members and other respectable citizens, that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” or the equally preposterous proposition that “There would be less crime if every citizen was armed”, permit me, on the grounds that every proposal has a right to be heard, to comment on an even more radically ridiculous proposal - that teachers in American schools should be armed with guns.
Talking points:
1. In the intimacy of a school it would be impossible to conceal which teachers were packing. “My Bobby [third grade] saw Mr. Sawyer’s gun poking out of his pocket.”
Since many of the shooters are disgruntled students of the schools they shoot up, they, too, would know who the gun-toters were. So the shooter-to-be would open the door of that classroom first to start his spree by taking down the armed teacher. Sometimes he would succeed.
2. Now you know how parents often have an overactive interest in their children’s educational welfare. Such parents would demand that their child not be placed in a packing teacher’s class. After all, they would claim, it is more dangerous there. The point is, that it would increase the administrative burden of assigning students to classes. You might ask for parents to volunteer their children for those particular classes, but what if a principal couldn’t get enough volunteers? Just a minor administrative problem. Hire a few more teachers. No, the budget-conscious administrative voices would block that.
2 A good alternative proposal then has recently emerged: equip all the pupils with guns. Then… then, the ultimate solution, there would be no crime, nobody would be killed (according to the “guns don’t kill people” principle.)
3 Well,I don’t know. That argument would make the shooter-to-be an honest citizen merely exercising his Second Amendment rights. Trust me. In America today, anything is possible. Even in Supreme Court decisions. Remember the Citizens United decision that money must be allowed to buy elections. Blog #14
4 Attaining competence with firearms under either regime - armed teachers, or armed students.
Now, open disclosure here. Your blogster has not handled a firearm for many years, but was once upon a time an instructor teaching cadets how to clean, load and fire a military rifle. He even fired a Bren machine gun. It was a weighty weapon with a pair of legs on the barrel. You plopped it down on the ground on its legs and laid your own body on the ground behind it. If you just squeezed the trigger you could empty a magazine in seconds. So we were taught to say “Sunovabitch, Sunovabitch. Sunovabitch” as we squeezed the trigger three times. That fired off only three or four rounds with each squeeze.
But, I digress. Maybe just as well, even though there are several more points to be made regarding “unintended consequences” and “collateral damage” if the armed schools followed the long-held American tradition of “Shoot first, and ask questions later.”
But, enough is enough on this subject..
Next posting, back to the law of money and a new approach to recognizing a real democracy, thanks to Adam, the man..
