Where will you be when the Blackhawks land?

The Second Amendment:  A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

First of all lets get the English teacher side of me out of the way and deal with the horrible punctuation in that (ahem) sentence.  Actually, the amendment has two historical versions.  The one above was the first one written, I suppose, by James Madison.  The one congress finally approved and the states ratified, eliminated the first and last commas.

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall  not be infringed."

 There, that's better.

But as I see it, there are two problems with the construction of that sentence.  First, some history.  The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution at the insistence of the anti-federalists, particularly George Mason and James Madison of Virginia.  They were both spurred on by an equally anti-federalistic Thomas Jefferson kibbitzing from France.  The anti-federalists were not interested in giving that much power to a central government without protecting the rights of the individuals and the states.  The federalists in the person of Alexander Hamilton thought the inclusion of a Bill of Rights would not only  be redundant, since all the rights enumerated in the first ten amendments were already implicit in the Constitution, but also draw attention to those rights not explicitly guaranteed.  Thomas Jefferson didn't like the idea of a Constitution whose laws had to be inferred.  He would rather have them spelled out, thank you very much.  It is the same position Dragline held in COOL HAND LUKE:  "When it comes to the Law, nothing is understood."

So, to make a long story short, Madison was ultimately responsible for The Bill of Rights with much help and guidance from sources of all descriptions.  The main thing to remember here is that The Bill of Rights was created to protect the freedom and rights of the individual and the states against the possibility of an over reaching government.  After all, look at what happened with England.  Therefore, there is a lot of language in the Constitution devoted to spelling out the different rights and responsibilities held by the states versus those GRANTED to the federal government.

Now back to the Second Amendment.  The biggest problem with the wording, at least for me, is the use of the term "free state."  Since I've never really given that much thought to the subject, I always just assumed that "free state" referred to the body politic--you know, to The United States.  But that interpretation is clearly wrong.  The amendment is concerned over the security of free individual states (read: Virginia, or Massachusetts, or Rhode Island) when threatened by outside forces up to and including the federal government.  The militia is needed to defend the state from the government!

The next problem is the use of the phrase "the people" rather than simply "people."  In my reading, "the people" is an abstraction.  It suggests that communities may create militia for their protection.  If the amendment simply said "people" it would suggest that everyone could have a gun.

And of course the biggest problem is the phrase "a well regulated militia."  Gun control advocates use that phrase to support the idea that guns are not an individual right, but only a right when in the military.  Gun  rights advocates generally ignore the phrase as being anachronistic.

The interesting thing is that all this got resolved by The Supremes in 2008 (US vs. Heller).  This was the first time a higher court ruled on the individual right to bear arms.  The first time!  Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion which overturned a Washington D.C. law banning fire arms in the city limits.  Scalia cited a previous case (US vs. Miller) to support an individual's right to carry a gun.  The idea of a militia when the amendment was written was a community wide commitment by able bodied, free white men to grab their guns and run to the Commons where they would form into a militia when called to repel invading indians, or French, or British, or perhaps invading clouds of Black Hawk helicopters.  Therefore it was clear that not only did individuals have a right to carry a gun, they almost had a responsibility.  Cool argument.  They went on to say that the men who came running were toting only those guns that most everybody else had access to.  In other words, plenty of muskets and powder horns, precious few oil pots, catapults, or Bushmasters.

Finally, Scalia also made it clear that there was nothing in the decision to suggest that other means of controlling weaponry or the people who use it are not perfectly consistent with the amendment.

All this kind of explains the lunatic paranoia over the GUVMINT coming to take our guns.  We have a long history of that kind of thinking and a lot of it was justified.

But is it justified any more?  The arguments just don't ring true.  I was watching coverage of a gun rights protest outside some state house.  The TV type stuck her mic in one man's face and asked him why he was against an assault weapons ban.  He gave the old "slippery slope"  argument.  You know, first they take our assault weapons, next they'll be after our squirrel rifles.  Implicit in all of this is the notion of THEY.  Our government is THEY and THEY are our enemy.  If I was carrying a musket in 1785, I would understand that kind of thinking (Although, I'd want something with a little more fire power when the Blackhawks start landing in my back yard.).  In 2013 it just seems crazy.

Sleep Number Beds, Congress, and Tuna Helper

An MSNBC poll has shown that the number one thing the country wants out of Congress is cooperation and compromise.  After that, the country wants to raise taxes, lower taxes, cut entitlements, preserve entitlements, ban assault weapons, preserve the Second Amendment, oh yeah, and solve the budget crisis du jour.  I just don't think we live in cooperative times, but I think Congress' inability to compromise is symptom, not a cause.

I blame sleep number beds.  The idea that you can each have it your own way when it comes to comfort, or that you would even have different standards of softness and firmness, strikes me as perverse and goes a long way toward explaining Congress' inability to reach accord.  Part of being married is learning to meet one another's needs, to compromise, adjust, redefine, feel empathy, all the same qualities one might wish for in a legislator.  But prospective legislators are being lulled away from the need to cooperate by the false promises of sleep number beds.

Don''t be fooled by the advertisements suggesting the ability to set your own level of firmness somehow leads to happier marriages.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Married couples learn they somehow don't have to compromise in a sleep number bed.  If you can cruise by on setting number three while your spouse settles for number five, what other issues can you remain firm (so to speak) on?  Maybe "I DON'T BARGAIN!" can become your new starting point for all negotiations.

"Do we have to have Tuna Helper again?"  

"YES!!!!"

I'm pretty sure if you check up on your history, you will discover that sleep number beds came into being about the same time Congress became dysfunctional.  Newt Gingrich was the Speaker.  He did not use a sleep number bed himself.  It seems he was worried about confusing his wife's number with any of the other numbers he had to juggle, but he helped promote the I DON'T BARGAIN ethos that has since pervaded everything.

Even though the beds started the whole thing, there are other causes as well.  Our car, for example, has separate temperature controls for the passenger and driver side.  Katherine likes to ramp up her temperature to ridiculous heights, while I keep mine at a steady 68.  See what I mean?  The separate controls were probably put there to promote compatibility and comfort, but I just see it as a kind of competition.  Can't she see that my temperature is the correct one for any given moment?  How can she stand it that hot?

I'm sure the same thing happens with sleep number beds.  That's why I refuse to get one.  I'm not sure my marriage would survive.

"Number 8!  Why so hard?  What's she trying to prove, just because I like it down around 3."

"3!  He just set it there to make fun of my number.  Just for that, I'll turn mine up to 10.  That'll teach him."

See what I mean?  No wonder Congress has trouble.

"Oh, reason not the need."

Everyone's reaction to the President's gun initiative(s) has made me think more about the issue whether I want to or not.  I've also been thinking more about the post I wrote yesterday discussing the false analogy of video games to assault weapons.  I've been sitting upstairs listening to various pundits weigh in on Chuck Todd's Daily Wrap Up and trying to come up with analogies that make sense and the more I come up with the more I get confused about my own position.

If you factor out the loonies on both sides of this issue, the debate becomes increasingly interesting.

Why does anyone need a military style weapon with high capacity magazines, gun control advocates ask?  "Oh, reason not the need," Lear rightly says.  After all, why does anyone NEED anything?

I think the answer to that first question is that a Bushmaster with one of those magazines is a lot of fun at the shooting range, but we liberals roll our collective eyes at that answer.

Why does anyone NEED a military style vehicle, a Hummer?  Because they're fun!  Yes, they spew their lethal emissions into the atmosphere and cut up pristine forest land and make a lot of noise, but the fact remains that it would be cool to go four wheeling in one.

What about stock cars at Bandimere and the dirt bikes racing away just up the road?  My daughter almost got killed in a car accident.  Cars that can do the quarter mile in 2.5 seconds and reach speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour have no business on the roads.  Someone could get killed.  But on a closed track I wouldn't mind seeing what it would be like to get behind the wheel of one of those monsters.  I don't think we should have a federal push to control Funny Cars, besides it wouldn't do any good.  There are entirely too many Funny Cars in circulation already.

The problem is that it is also fun to treat this whole issue as an abstraction--to debate how many Bushmasters can balance on the head of a pin--but this issue is no abstraction.  This country has been debating the ambiguous language of the Second Amendment ever since the Reconstruction.  It has been interesting and amusing and intellectually stimulating, but it hasn't dealt with anything real and it certainly hasn't resulted in any clarity.

The whole debate reminds me a little of the health care fight four years ago.  Pundits on both sides never tired of weighing in.  Liberals and conservatives alike tried to derail the whole thing because they made good the enemy of perfect.  I loved following the debate, but then I already had health care and so did all the other debaters out there.  But we all forgot that there were real flesh and blood people going bankrupt because they needed some kind of resolution that took forever to come.  There were flesh and blood people denying themselves the care they needed while well-heeled pols back in Washington carried on their intellectual exercise in Parliamentary Procedure.

Well, there are a bunch of flesh and blood kids in Connecticut who are dead now.  How much more real can it get?  I don't know if anything will stop the violence, but I'm glad our President is willing to expend the political capital necessary to have the dialogue.  

The difference between assault weapons and videos

One of the (many) great things about teaching is that whenever I found a student who was not listening, or who misunderstood a previous statement, I could always call him or her on it.  I could give the offending student a bonus F, insist that he paraphrase the previous speaker, ask for objective details to back up all the subjective labels.  With me in control, most of the conversations we had in my classroom actually went somewhere and accomplished something.  Well, most of them did.

But outside of the classroom I don't do so well.  Adults don't take kindly to being asked to paraphrase the previous speaker.  And giving them a bonus F almost always results in bad feelings.  If these adults would just slow down and listen, behave a little more like 18 year old seniors in high school, maybe we wouldn't have all this disfunction in Washington.  I think the powers that be should hire Kathie and me to go into Congress and run them through a few forced choice discussions.

Joe Scarborough would certainly profit from such a class.  This morning he was having a ridiculous argument with Donny, one of the liberal balances to Joe's rampant conservatism.  They were discussing gun stuff.  On MORNING JOE there are only two topics of conversation:  hand-wringing over whichever fiscal disaster is the next one looming on the horizon, and the movement of the NRA to the fringe over the latest gun rights debate.

Donny's point--one that I strongly agree with--was that if we're going to do anything about this national problem we need to focus on one issue rather than get distracted with all the other tangential ones.  In other words, even though we need to address the proliferation of violent video games, let us not let that distract us from the big issue, namely GUNS.  Donny said that we had a chance to take the "mass" out of mass murder by going for assault weapons, but it was impossible to isolate children from the all-pervasiveness of our culture by regulating video games.  Joe freaked out and said that was the old liberal argument that was causing all the trouble.  Liberals want the first amendment to be absolute, but they want to limit the second amendment.

So Joe was saying that calling for regulation of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines was analogous to calling for the regulation of video games.  His point was that defending the creation of video games and presumably violent movies and television shows under the first amendment was no different than defending assault weapons under the second.

If Joe were in my class I would feel compelled to launch into a lesson about analogies.  The two situations are completely different.  I can establish a direct cause-effect relationship between a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle and the death of 20 first graders.  Take away the Bushmaster and the kids are still alive, or at least more of them are.  But for the life of me I don't see a similarly direct cause-effect relationship between playing a violent video game in your basement or bedroom and the immediate death of anyone.

It is a hard call, I realize.  The idea of some sad little boy or girl playing violent, desensitizing games all day is incredibly depressing--if I were King of the world I would mandate that all children be compelled to play work-up softball games with the neighborhood children in the vacant lot out back until it got too dark to see the ball--but the video game itself is not deadly, unless you can manage to club someone to death with it.  The difference is so obvious it seems silly to even talk about it.

Of course the problems leading to mass murder go way beyond gun control and curtailing violent video games.  We have a lot more irresponsible parents, or well-intentioned parents over their heads, than we have maniacal gun dealers trying to encourage murder and mayhem, but doing something about assault weapons and high capacity magazines, even though it might inconvenience some perfectly legitimate fun with munitions, seems like as good a place to start as any.

". . . as mad as a wealthy man . . ."

I read something yesterday about a moment in the new Hobbit movie and I will try to relate it from memory, since actually checking for accuracy would be a drag and not in the spirit of blogging.  There is a moment when some character is extremely angry (I'm not a big fan of Tolkien--although I have taught THE HOBBIT--so I can't be very specific here.) and the line, presumably Tokien's, goes something like this:  "He was as mad as a wealthy man when faced with the prospect of losing something he has forgotten about and probably never used."

Nicely put.  Let me be clear here.  I have nothing against wealthy people.  On those occasions when I have hung out with them they have always been gracious, articulate, and poured great wine.  I would like to join their number.  But Tolkien's description rings true, doesn't it?

Then this morning I read three articles in the International section of THE NEW YORK TIMES that are kind of germane and really disturbing in that they all elaborate on the theme I've set above.  They all tell the story of the rich riding roughshod over the poor.

"As Biofuel Demand Grows, So Do Guatemala's Hunger Pangs" explains how Guatemala is one of the world's most malnourished countries (#4) thanks mostly to the demand by the developed world (read:  USA) for biofuels.  I've been in Guatemala.  Beautiful.  Lush.  Scary.  All those things.  But like all Latin American countries, its diet is based on corn and it is more profitable to grow corn for chicken feed and biofuels than it is to grow corn that could be used to feed people.  The price of tortillas in Guatemala, by the way, has doubled in the past few years.  That might not mean much to someone living in the suburbs of Denver, but it means a lot to a poor farmer in Guatemala who has discovered that there is no longer any land available to plant crops that are not already earmarked for gas pumps in the USA.  Whenever we visit Belize and near the Guatemalan border, we are warned about "Banditos."  Is it any wonder?  What alternative do they have?  Besides, the real Banditos are the fat cats in our country making money hand over fist.

"Greek Tax Scandal Diverts Attention From the Country's Shortfall in Collections" explains that the main reason for Greece's economic malaise is the long tradition of wealthy Greeks dodging taxes.  The government only brought in half the tax revenues expected because the country lacks the political will to pursue the wealthy tax dodgers.  Who pays the freight?  The same people who pay the freight everywhere.  The ones who can afford it least.

"With Deposits, India Aims to Keep Money for the Poor From Other's Pockets" speaks for itself.  India has more poor and destitute than any other country.  One reason for that is the wealthy finding opportunities to cash in.

"Everywhere I look I see people cashing in, cashing in on every decent human impulse . . ." Yossarian rightly said.  What would he see today?

C. Fite's Santas and Cousin Margaret's "Fuck-It" List

Katherine here.

I'm a creature of guilt.  It's not fair.  I'm not even one of those religions that feeds itself on guilt.  I hate that I'm pretty much consumed by guilt because I've given myself a snow day when I could get to my schools by adding some driving time and getting into my pioneer mood.  It's pretty windy though.  My pioneer mood sucks when it comes to wind.

I figure if I do something productive like writing this, my guilt will abate a bit.  At the moment the only productive alternative I could think of that felt worthy of snow day status was to plug away at our traditional holiday jigsaw puzzle.  I need to build up to that.  It's a Van Gogh Paris street scene done in 1,000 seemingly identical pieces.  Progress has been slow although I tucked in two orangish pieces yesterday.  Jim has done more on the puzzle than I have.  I feel like a slacker.  Guilt.

I had an interesting bout of playful guilt recently when we had a fun dinner over at the Fite-Garland home.  Wondrous and varied Santas populated the whole place.  There were two miniature forests of long and lean Christmas trees replacing the one central tree most of us do.  The trees were decorated thematically both in color and content.  Did I mention there were Santas everywhere?

The Santas, Cindy explained, arose from an outing with her sister and Mom where they all purchased an identical Santa one year long ago.  Each year, each woman buys three Santas and shares two with the others and each year a home is populated with the same Santas in different places and in different formations.  So cool.

Part of me is filled with wonder and part of me realizes that if I had done something like that, I'd have no place to store the Santas and they wouldn't look right with me as their guardian.

The whole thing reminded me of a lifetime of guilt I have about holiday decorating.  I didn't get the holiday decorating gene.  I was a working mom with three kids and a huge amount of grading around every holiday I can think of except the 4th of July and even with that one I never got a buzz out of watching fireworks.

I did the basics for holidays.  We carved pumpkins, did the Valentine thing, and the Easter Bunny arrived dutifully though without the house looking any differently than it normally did.  At Christmas we have one very tall tree decorated with a lifetime of gorgeous ornaments and red bows and if I'm feeling extra festive, I add some red poinsettias to the living room.  I like red.

I was feeling really festive this year.  I  designed new bows and had the Christmas store make them for our big tree and bought new lights.  The bows are chartreuse, purple and red.  I bought two purple poinsettias and one very large white one.  From my point of view, this was a decoration revolution of sorts.  I was in a kind of gung-ho mood.

Then I went to Cindy's.  It was so beautiful.  So full of love and history and good taste.  I guess that was it.  C's house was one of the few I'd ever seen outside some special tour or a Christmas store that was not cute.  It was really beautiful.

I felt guilty for a bit over my holiday efforts, but I'm over that.  Even though the decor is restrained, it's really pretty.  I like my little snowman sitting on the mantle, tucked between one purple poinsettia and some green fern thing that's meant to look like a miniature Christmas tree.  I like my big tree and it's new bows and lights.  Even though it's not for Christmas, I like my forest of orchids that make it seem the fish in the paintings on the wall above them are swimming through something sea-like.  I even like the unfinished jigsaw puzzle that occupies the coffee table.  My house looks good.

I had a kind of monumental moment when I realized how much I liked my house and it's holiday decor after my return from Cindy's wonderland.  My house is just fine so  I put massive holiday decorating on my "Fuck It" list.  It was great.

I need to talk about the list and it's origins.  My cousin Margaret invented it.  Margaret is just a bit older than me and she's been a real-life mentor since I was little.  She taught me to shuffle cards, paint my nails, and to dance the twist in her garage.  She's taught me how to make pickles in the last year.  I hope everybody has a cousin Margaret.  I think she's an essential person to my perspective on lots of things.  She's a great teacher and one of her best recent lessons is about her "Fuck It" list.

When you get to be Margaret's age, my age, there are things you just don't want to do anymore.  If you can stop doing them without harming others or yourself, she says it's time to "Fuck It."  It seemed so easy at first.

It's been interesting working on my own "Fuck It" list.  I'm circling back to guilt here.  I spent a week trying to put something on my list.  Every time I got close, I started worrying--what if America needs me to make phone calls at a phone bank again, what if my absence from an exercise class gets the class cancelled for lack of attendance--it was a hellish week of trying desperately to put something on the list without success.  I felt guilty about that too.

I texted Margaret (too embarrassed to call) and I asked if I put something on the "Fuck It" list, could I take if off later if need be.  She assured me it would be okay.  Whew.

I still struggle with my own "Fuck It" list.  Nevertheless, it is slowly growing.  It's pretty liberating.  Try it sometime.

Katherine's "Fuck it" List.

1.  Making phone calls from a phone bank for any reason.
2.  Showing up consistently for any organized exercise class.
3.  Wearing the prosthetic boobs I bought.
4.  Decorating my house to the hilt for any holiday.

I'm A Teacher And I'm Always Packing?

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?