Is the NRA's Wayne LaPierre insane. Or just self serving? It is after all, his job.
Add armed guards to all our schools? We can't even afford to pay our teachers a decent wage, now we need armed guards? Guards who you know won't be the cream of the crop, let's face it. Have you SEEN the TSA? Putting armed guards in thousands of schools would boost the NRA's credibility and boost the gun industry by quite a bit. But it wouldn't protect all that much. Most of those schools would never see an incident and it would be a huge waste of money and resources.
Wouldn't it make more sense, along with whatever else we decide upon to correct this rather small but very noticeable national trend of mass murder, to reinforce the schoolrooms so that they can be locked down when something happens, securing the children, teachers and administrators from attack and locking off or in, the perpetrators? Wouldn't that create jobs? Jobs that would begin and then be over but not go on forever like armed security?
Perhaps having a locked down gun in every school and one or two members of schools to have training access to use that weapon should something ever happen, before police show up, might be a reasonable thing.
The NRA has called their suggested program, the "Shield Program". Isn't that what I'm suggesting here? To give schools the ability to engage a shield if an when it is necessary? Isn't this far more aligned with being a "shield" than the NRA's suggestion of bringing more guns into the schools?
Consider, how often does this happen to schools? How many schools are there? This is not a massive thing, it's effects on us emotionally is massive. According to the National Center for Education Statistics via NPR, March 16, shows that in 1993 and 1994 there were 40 homicides each year in elementary and high schools. Guess the insanity of Junior High schools keeps most crazies out of those institutions for reasons of competition? Or maybe they are grouping Jr. High and High schools?
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| Does this look like an epidemic? |
The point is, the media has saturated us with this event. Yes, it's horrible. Yes, if it were my kids killed or even in that school I'd be incensed. But that's why we have calmer professionals around, to think for us when we can't.
No, I don't think we need to arm our schools, or our society. Yes, we have the right to keep and bear arms. Work it out. But in an intelligent way. We need more jobs right? Which makes more sense, hiring armed guards, or putting laborers to work on schools?
Then there is legislation. Do we really need assault weapons? Well, perhaps it's our right, but just as we don't or shouldn't have the right to own anti tank weapons, we probably should not have full assault weaponry. Perhaps we can with limitations. For a long, long time it's been legal to have fully automatic weapons but the license for it is very expensive, or used to be. You can own a suppressor/silencer, but you need the licensing. Not every Tom, Dick and Idiot needs to be owning one.
Of course, you can make your own and most of what's going on subverts gun laws so how cracking down on guns legally will keep illegal usage down, I'm not so sure. Yes, less guns around is less ability to use them. But it seems that a lot of these killings (and most are in inner cities but no one seems to care about that, just when children are kills, so if you'd paid attention sooner to the people you DON'T care about, maybe your kids wouldn't be getting killed now?
And I think that is a relevant point. It's not the guns that are killing people. It's the attitude and the culture of this nation that is doing it, or at least, allowing it to be possible. Even, if you think about it, reasonable Reasonable in that sense that you can reason why this might happen, not in the sense that it's a reasonable thing to allow, or put up with.
So, should we do something? Yes. But let's make it something that will functionally do something and not just waste money. Going to war with Iraq was doing something about 9/11 but was it the most functional thing to do considering the situation? Hell, no. Going into Afghanistan was and we did that within a few weeks and we kicked some serious ass, but almost no one knew that, because we wanted more pain on the other side. What other side? We didn't really care, we wanted to lash out and old Bush Jr. was happy to help out and look good.
Like now, we want to lash out, but does it matter if we do anything reasonable, or functional? Or should we just have a bunch of knee jerk reactions to what feels good to do?
Let's do something to solve the problem. Because whatever that is, it probably won't feel good, or good enough, but it could be the right thing to do.
More guns, isn't the solution to guns. Those controlling the guns, is where the real issue lay, and no one wants to deal with that. I'm actually getting exhausted repeating this line over and over again to people. Because, no one is listening.
They just want to last out and hope that stops these things from happening. Well, guess what? It won't. Because you see, you actually have to do something that is useful, to stop things that you don't want to happen, from happening.
