Some of my good friends welcomed me back. Others not so much. Don’t you hate that phrase? Next worst thing
to “Whatever.” Unless you remember the
off-tone flat NOT, grotesquely appended to statements that say the opposite of
what the speaker means.
In her sweet way, my old girlfriend’s trying to pick a fight
with me. She says at least I’m not for
arming teachers.
Arming teachers?
Certainly not. I’ve been around
too many. I would not go into a school
and willy-nilly give teachers guns.
Teaching is a voluble profession.
You deal with living human beings, often in an involuntary, captive
situation. There’s ancient hostility
built into the relationship, and guess what? It sometimes explodes.
I would, however, allow any person, teacher or no, who is already the legal holder of a gun
permit, to exercise the right to carry a defensive weapon in schools, in post
offices, in banks, just as in a restaurant or on the street. Because life is also a hostile situation, and
these people have been cleared to react sanely.
If this is too much for you, judges could confer special school-status
to existing permit holders already in the school, much as they do with sky
marshals.
You people who think you’ll burn in hell if you set eyes on
an NRA magazine have no idea how many lives are saved because the bad guy
wasn’t the only one with a gun. You
don’t hear because “they” don’t want you to.
And you know who I mean by “they.”
They don’t want any of us to have guns because they, though not you,
know that one of the prime reasons for the second amendment is to insure that a
government doesn’t get too uppity. Oppressed
people in a dictatorial country rise up with assault weapons. That’s why they are particularly anxious to
get rid of those. With assault weapons,
it’s possible to hold off the government’s representatives when they come to
take you out.
You don’t need to be told – you can imagine for yourself –
how different school vulnerability would be if they were not gun-free zones
where monsters can get away with murder.
They wouldn’t have gone there in the first place, and if they did, they
wouldn’t get very far.
No, I don’t think the insane, the irresponsible, the
cavalier, the temperamentally disabled, or women who blame PMS for unconscionable
behavior, should have guns – teachers or otherwise.
The aforementioned NRA wants to put an armed policeman in
every school. I say “no” to that. A lone policeman becomes the first target. But if it’s known that inside the building
there are a number of anonymous people with guns, that building will no longer
be attractive to evil-doers. Besides,
police is a bad idea because people with authority tend to increase their
authority. The police would enlarge
their in-school role. Even you don’t
want that.
If you are somebody who fears guns in the hands of other
law-abiding citizens, I strongly recommend that you not have a gun. The
gun-owners I know speak about the added responsibility, the change in your
thinking when you know you’re carrying, the knowledge that you must remain
level-headed or you’re a danger to yourself and others. Not everybody would welcome such an
imperative, and that’s good. It means
you can trust the ones who do.
Keeping guns out of the hand of the crazies? Keeping the crazies off the street? Creating fewer crazies? Vital, of course, but we can’t solve those problems
overnight. However, we can solve the
problem of school shooting tomorrow by deleting the designation “Gun Free
Zone.”
Disarming for safety is only one of the liberal myths, akin
to thinking that if we destroy our nuclear arsenal, nobody will bomb us.
