A Really Bad Idea From Two Really Bad Individuals

       So, let me see if I understand. POTUS says we ought to pay a bonus to teachers willing to carry guns in school, because this will deter a “killer” (his words). In the most recent disaster involving such a person, the school resource officer(SRO), an armed deputy sheriff assigned to the school, cringed, outside, for four minutes after the shooting started. This is on video, by the way, not an allegation, not “fake news”, etc. The shooter continued his rampage for 6 minutes. Might early action by the SRO have saved lives? Probably. Would a non-uniformed teacher with a gun have acted differently?

       In Trump/NRA world, of course the answer is, “Yes. Of course. These highly (un)trained small arms experts (Wayne LaPierre uses the term “gun adepts”) would disable the shooter, SEAL style, and save the children.”

       What’s missing here is that neither Trump (bone spur, diagnosed by the family doctor. Yeah, right!) or Wayne LaPierre (draft deferred somehow, now NRA talking head at $970,000 annually) ever has been in harm’s way. Neither did military service, and neither has the actual experience to truthfully evaluate the validity of their statements. 

       We as a nation have been fed for well over a century and a half, a myth about guns and the ability of the “good guys” to overcome the bad guys in the name of truth, justice and the American way, going all the way back to the American frontier where all this started. Zane Gray, Owen Wister and other originators of the dime novel western hero prototype good guy with a gun and a white hat furthered the myth, and movies almost immediately picked up on the American West’s particular version of noble knights on white horses. We have the ludicrous spectacle of the Lone Ranger (intentionally) shooting the pistols out of Butch Cavendish’s hand. All the gun toters with black hats eventually lose to their white hat counterparts. Of course, it really wasn’t like that. The fair fast draw gunfight in the street between the Sheriff and the bad guys while the kiddies watched, is a myth. What happened at the OK corral is a lot closer to the bone and to the truth. In fact, Bat Masterson, one of the better known (and romanticized) western “lawmen,” preferred a shotgun and that, frequently, in the back.

       In like manner, those men who got there first and claimed the most land (not paying, mind you, just claiming) in many cases then used gun violence or threats of same to deter others who might have thought that the land was theirs to graze on as well. In fact, the early western cattle barons were an oligarchy onto themselves, and sheep man or small rancher beware. “Back East”, men like Rockefeller used economic dirty tricks to vanquish competitors, but in Montana, cattle barons hired killers like Tom Horn to simply kill the competition or even those small homesteaders who dared to fence the land they bought.

       However, the biggest lie of the gun lobby re: armed teachers is borne out by real Law Enforcement’s almost unanimous opposition to the concept. Why, you ask?

It’s simple, really. What professionals who are paid to be armed and expected to be proficient with those arms all know is this: It is almost irrelevant how many hours on the pistol range or how many rounds you’ve pumped through that handgun, when someone begins shooting at you. There’s a reason that snipers have such a high success rate. No one is shooting at them. Hand guns are different.

       Every so often, a relative of someone killed by law enforcement will ignore the fact that their late cousin, brother whoever) was a felon, resisting arrest, armed and shooting at the police and focus instead on how many rounds he was shot with. This is almost (I said “almost”, ease up) amusing. Not because someone is dead, but because dead is dead. Period. The reason that so many of these instances occur is that in a real crisis situation, much of that “on the range” calm, cool, shit evaporates, and the survival urge kicks in. This usually manifests itself by emptying one’s clip in the general direction of the other shooter. This is true, even with training and refresher training for military and civilian sidearm carrying personnel. What is amazing is how often many of these shots miss. The same has proven true for trained military personnel, some of whom, in actual WW II combat situations, never even fired their weapon. Now we are to believe that it is different for teachers?

As long as the shooters continue to have access to semi-automatic or automatic weapons and banana clips with numerous rounds of ammo, the teacher with the handgun is just another target.

Classroom teachers have enough on their plates in dealing with the responsibility of helping children learn respect for others and themselves, curriculum content, critical thinking and most importantly, to respectfully question what seems wrong. Expecting any of them to add “armed guard” to that task is ludicrous. What is so troubling to me, as a former side arm qualified armed watch stander indoctrinator for security forces in a foreign port, is that those who buy into the Trump/La Pierre rhetoric have, apparently lost, or have never had, the ability to either think critically or question their fearless leaders