No … no … no. No we do not need teachers carrying guns in school. It’s not going to solve any problems, and it will introduce a whole slew of other issues. It’s such a ridiculous idea, I can’t believe people are actually considering it.
First off, teachers are normal people, and normal people with guns are just as dangerous as criminals with guns. Sometimes more-so. They are Marines. The extent of any gun classes you could give them would be the same sort of gun classes I’ve had (though I have had advanced training as well), and it’s not going to prepare them for taking down someone who comes into a school with guns blazing. They are teachers, not cops or military.
Secondly, our mission is to keep guns out of schools. If teachers have guns in the school, then there’s a nice ready source of guns … and don’t think kids or other criminals won’t be able to get them away from the teacher. They’ll be able to. The first thing you learn about guns is if you aren’t 100% sure of your actions and react quickly and correctly, your own weapon will be used against you.
Also, who says it’s safe to trust teachers with guns? I have had some crazy-assed teachers in my day, and the last thing some of them needed was a weapon to wave about as a source of torment. Trust me, the golf club my government teacher used as a terror device in that classroom was bad enough. I have no doubt he would have just loved to show us his gun and threaten us with it. Some teachers are asses, and some teachers are crazy, and some teachers aren’t capable of properly handling a weapon even after training. None of these people needs to have a gun in a classroom.
So what’s next? Schools run by the military and fully armed Marines as teachers? It’s not going to solve the problem of crazy kids and crazy adults shooting up schools. It’s just going to escalate the problem. The introduction of firearms to a problem always escalates it to a new and higher level. Mark my words, no good can come from teachers with guns.
It’s unfortunate that people (as a group) usually misinterpret the cause-and-effect relationship between important events in some way that is convenient and comfortable for themselves (see the book Freakonomics in which, among other things, a striking relationship between murder and abortion law is uncovered). The medium of the blog unfortunately doesn’t offer enough room to explain any of this in detail (there’s just not enough time/space to explain it here)…
that being said, the largest contributor to school shootings will probably never be widely accepted / acknowledged by the public because it’s inconvenient for parents. It is however described in a paragraph of the book How to Overthrow the Government by Ariana Huffington.
It turns out that when your first answer to having an unhappy or “unruly” child is to drug them so they’re not unhappy, they experience something called “blunting” (a well known phenomenon in psych. circles). In other words, the drug that makes them not care that their life sucks doesn’t discriminate — it also makes them not care about the consequences of their actions, so for example, gunning down a bunch of people you don’t particularly like seems a lot more reasonable. There are apparently lots more cases of kids being caught while preparing to do these things all over the country which the drug companies spend lots of money keeping out of the news.
But what do I know? I think we’re overmedicated in general.
comment should read “a chapter of the book” heh — sorry — none of the cynicism is directed at you btw, but rather at the legislators who want to arm the teachers. I just joined the binet austin group on yahoo and found your blog through there. :)
Merry Meet.
Welcome! Stick around a while, I guarantee I’ll babble your ears off. :lol:
I’m with you on viewing our whole society as overmedicated … particularly children (who I think really don’t need to be medicated at all except for extreme cases). One of the things I find most annoying about watching television these days (other than the lack of interesting shows) are the nearly non-stop drug commercials during prime time. Yeah, don’t smoke pot, because it’s BAD, but lookie here, we have a pill for anything that may or may not ail you.
I was a hyper, short attention spanned, imaginative, emotional, and intelligent kid, and I was bored to tears with school. Add to that being a geeky girl into books and science and the fact I was a late bloomer, so I wasn’t much of a social butterfly either. Yup, a real love/hate relationship with school. Loved learning. Hated school. Recipe for disaster had I not had great parents who did everything they could to fill in the gaps between what I needed from school and what I got … books, educational toys, musical instruments, trips to museums, stuff like that. I also had a few good teachers who saw that I needed more stimulation and challenge and worked hard to give me that. If I were a kid today, I have no doubt teachers and doctors would be trying to convince my parents that a few pills here and there would solve all the problems, make me sit still in school, and make me a happier child. The really sad thing is the number of totally normal kids with normal attention spans who aren’t hyper who are being drugged these days just to get them to shut up and stop being essentially kids.
But like you said, it doesn’t really solve any problems. I tried some variety of happy pills at one point some years ago, to fight depression and mood swings, and what I found was that yeah, I didn’t care so much about the feelings that were bringing me down, but I also didn’t care about much of anything at all (not even really myself). Now the only medications I allow anyone to convince me to take are aspirin and the occasional allergy pill or antibiotics of absolutely necessary. I am much better for it. Rather wake up with white days and black days than every day being grey. Changes in lifestyle did more for me than any pill every did.
And yeah, guns in schools. Armed teachers. I was a teacher, and I would have never considered being allowed to take a gun to school a good idea, and I wouldn’t have wanted to work in a school where teachers did. It’s just freaking crazy and dangerous.
Just one more bit in the culture of fear we seem to want to live in these days. I, for one, refuse to give in and tremble.
Told you I’d babble your ears off. ;)
Yeah, it bothers me that my oldest daughter is now being medicated for what I’m sure amounts to just being a) a child or b) a person. But she lives with her mother in Dallas and I’m still in the process of trying to change my life enough to be able to see her regularly (which bothers me more than the medication). Hit that link to my “anti-blog” — amidst the commentary on the needful accelleration of everything in our culture, you’ll find some of my thoughts on TV. Yes I’m a cynic in that regard, no that’s not going to change. :)
TV programming, in general, sucks. I don’t even watch anything on the regular networks anymore. I have given up watching 24 hour news channels (TV news of all sorts really). All those stupid “reality” shows are ridiculous and not at all representative of reality. All of it is a bunch of crap put out there to entertain the lowest common demoninator, and that’s apparently pretty damn low. I’ll stick to watching the educational channels, the SciFi channels and DVD movies … and reading books and intellectual magazines. I used to laugh when people said TV would rot your brain. I am not laughing anymore.
Yeah, there are a handful of notable exceptions. I like MythBusters or for that matter even Dirty Jobs even though the info isn’t very useful to me. I had been real interested in My Name is Earl but as of yet haven’t caught an episode for various reasons. Monk I actually watched regularly for a while — imo one of the funniest shows on TV. :) And Tiff and I have been gradually going through the series of 3rd Rock From the Sun via Netflix, which is also toward the top of my list for comedy. Tiff likes Cat House and Animal Planet (funny, when I say it that way they sound related), though she mostly channel surfs, so it’s rare that she sees an entire show.
The only shows I watch regularly are The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Jim Lehrer, and the SciFi Friday lineup … and anything on cosmology/space/phsyics on the learning channels. Lin likes the military channel and shows on how things are made or done. Oh, and I watch craft shows when I remember to turn the TV on during the day (it usually doesn’t get turned on until 8 pm or so). Other than that, it’s hit and miss. Mostly when I want to watch TV, I pop in a DVD movie or TV series (currently working my way through Star Trek Next Generation). I’ve tried to watch the shows all my friends adore (Lost, Smallville, 24, stuff like that), because I miss out on a lot of references they make, and I sometimes feel left out of conversations, but … I just can’t get into them enough to remember when they come on.
Maybe it’s that I didn’t watch much TV as a kid. We lived in the middle of nowhere and only got about four channels. Cable didn’t happen until I was almost out of high school. And my parents were strict about what I watched too (which I think was a good thing). I don’t know. I’m just not that much into TV.
Now Playstation games … those, I am addicted to. :D
Now 3rd Rock was a fantastic show. I loved that show. Thanks for reminding me about it. I might have to line up getting those DVDs too.
Yeah, I’m seriously thinking about buying the whole series of 3rd Rock when I get some cash. We already have the whole series of Futurama (and Firefly). The Simpsons (since Futurama was also a Matt Groening series) has had its moments, but I never watched it regularly and it’s never been good enough for me to purchase. Funny, there’s a correlation there with FireFly too — Buffy had its moments, but I also never watched it regularly and it wasn’t good enough for me to purchase (since Buffy and Firefly are both Joss Whedon series like Groening’s 2 series). In both cases I’ve preferred the 2nd, less popular and shorter lived series. :P Though in the case if Firefly I think poor handling of the series by the network had more to do with its being cancelled at the end of the first season than anything to do with the series.