I played a little TV game the first day I watched the news reports from Connecticut. I rotated between Fox, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and CNN. I would settle in on one channel, but as soon as that report became political, or shoved a microphone in some poor kid's face, or started offering speculation based on nothing, I changed to another channel where I would watch until I had to change again. It didn't take long before my game became an endless rotation through the dial, but I did learn a few things. I was semi-surprised to learn that Fox was more likely to breathlessly put out false information than the other channels, even MSNBC. Fox was the first to misidentify the shooter as his older brother! It was also the first to announce that the shooter's mother was a kindergarten teacher at the school and that she lay dead in her classroom. All the other channels quickly followed suit, but I was happy to note that the folks at MSNBC were more apt to preface all their bogus pronouncements with the caveat that their story was unsubstantiated. I guess we can be grateful for that, although I would prefer that unsubstantiated stories be left off the news!
Later, as the different channels finally narrowed in on the true story, the speculation began. Fox spent a lot of time wondering about security and called for us to begin arming teachers. If only the faculty and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary had been packing, all this never would have happened. Right! Over at MSNBC the speculation, like we can expect from all good liberals, turned to social services. They got a few staff psychologists on the air who proceeded to psychoanalyze the shooter based on the information that he was a loner at school, may or may not have lived with his mother, and was the product of a broken home. Depending on the psychological pundit, that meant he was variably a sociopath, a schizophrenic, bi-polar, and, although no one mentioned it, probably suffering Attention Deficit Disorder.
From there people on all sides of the political spectrum began weighing in. This is the wrong time to talk about gun control. This is the right time to talk about gun control. This is a war between the urban and rural parts of society. This is all about individual rights. This is all about the framers' original intent.
I have a few reactions to all of this. The slaughter of these innocents, especially at this time of year, has taken on biblical parallels to all the slaughtering of innocents that happen in those pages. Having said that, I can't help but point out that all of the lives taken by lunatic gunfire and not so lunatic gunfire in the past decade or so are equally precious and should have stirred the same outrage. Only Columbine came close because it was the first BIG event. Those teenagers and adults in Aurora had their lives taken from them every bit as suddenly as the poor little children in Connecticut. How many children die of starvation every day? How many die in drone aircraft strikes in Afghanistan and God knows where else? Is this shooter's sad lunacy more outrageous, more immoral, than the institutionalized lunacy that happens everywhere, everyday?
MSNBC absolves itself of its mute complicity in all those other deaths by calling for a shrink to make sense of it all. If we make sense of it all, we might be able to point our finger at the CAUSE of the problem. Than we can get federal funding and form a study group, or a Commission as Joe Lieberman calls it, and that will free us up to get back to thinking about the Fiscal Cliff.
Fox is worse. They just accept it as a given that maniacs will be out there armed to the teeth with legal assault rifles and similarly legal armor piercing bullets. Since that is the case, what we have to do is arm teachers. As one senator said, if the principal had just had her own Bushmaster stashed in a drawer somewhere, she could have whipped it out and blown the shooter's head off.
I don't need to point out the obvious, but I'm going to anyway. Most teachers I know, and I know plenty, would be at a disadvantage going up against a 20 year old lunatic in body armor and trained (BY HIS MOTHER!) in the use of assault weapons. "Now where did I put that magazine? Ah, there it is. Now which of these little slots does it go into?"
What would arming teachers really mean. It would seriously change the emphasis of methods courses. But that's okay because technology is freeing teachers up to spend more time in munitions training. When I was taking methods classes, we spent lots of time figuring out how to work the ditto machine. Now, since ditto machines have gone the way of blackboards (remember those), budding teachers can gather in classrooms where the instructor, an ex-marine, will take them through "The Naming of Parts." (That's a hilarious esoteric joke for all you English majors out there.)
But the problems are bigger than that. I looked it up at Cabela's and discovered that the cheapest Smith and Wesson six shot revolver sells for $250. There are 4000 teachers, not including non-certified help, in Jefferson County. Of course I'm assuming that the calls for arming teachers aren't calling for teachers to arm themselves, so that means that Jeffco would have to find another million dollars in its budget (definition of fat chance) to insure that all of its teachers were packing heat.
And let's face it. A lousy six shooter isn't going to be much help against a lunatic with a Bushmaster. The solution? Let's upgrade the weaponry. At Cabela's you can purchase a Bushmaster for $1000 and, the ad assured me, that is a real bargain, especially for an implement that is guaranteed to up your masculinity quotient tenfold. The problem is that equipping Jeffco teachers with the Bushmasters they will surely need (until the next escalation) will cost Jeffco and Jeffco taxpayers $4,000,000! We are talking about the same taxpayers who got upset a few years ago when they discovered that Jeffco schools were being profligate with the pizza parties they showered on their undeserving staffs.
I don't know about you, but I am skeptical about the efficacy of the arming teachers solution.
I remember a few years ago Kathie and I were touring Caracol, a Mayan ruin on the border between Belize and Guatemala, with Bud and Janet. The ruins were amazing, but I couldn't stop looking at the armed guards all over the place carrying Uzis (or Bushmasters, or AK 47s, I don't know the difference) and talking into Walky-Talkies. I didn't like the feeling. I don't want to replicate that scene at elementary schools all over the country.
Maybe instead of giving every teacher a gun, schools could do with guns what Green Mountain did with Walky-Talkies after Columbine. The school just owned a handful of the devices, so whenever you reported for your weekly tour of hall duty, the administrator du jour gave you a Walky-Talkie and instructed you to call in if you needed any help. As soon as I got out into the halls and away from the main office, I turned the stupid thing off and forgot about it. See what I mean? You can't trust someone like me with a communications device let alone a lethal weapon.
There is a sign in front of Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Sandy Hook Elementary
1956
Visitors Welcome
Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment