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The Blind Leading the Blind


One teacher said, “The idea that all teachers should be armed is crazy!”

Another said, “Anyone who thinks arming teachers would stop school shootings doesn’t understand what teachers do.”

Becky Pringle, Vice President of the National Education Association, offered, “Arming teachers, not a good idea, I cannot imagine having that responsibility of carrying a gun. What’s being described by the president and others sounds more like a prison to me, with the teachers as armed guards and the students as prisoners.”

What nonsense! The guns aren’t going to be used to oppress students. Progressive reactionaries assume any law enforcement or authority is automatically oppressive. Would she suggest that parents who lock their doors are making prisoners of their kids?

Statements like that are illustrative of why we have so many ill-informed student snowflakes in our culture. You can’t teach what you don’t know. If educators make decisions based on convoluted reasoning and raw emotion, their students will too. No one is suggesting we should arm all teachers, so Ms. Pringle isn’t listening well. Whether critics, parents or law enforcement “understand what teachers do” is irrelevant to the discussion. We already know what they don’t do, and that is to fight back or stop psychopaths from gunning down students.

It worries me that the adults whose job it is to teach our kids how to deal with problems in life don’t listen well. They too often misidentify or mischaracterize problems, and reject imperial evidence that doesn’t sit well with their political anxieties. News coverage of the CNN town hall in Florida exposed teaching professional’s lack of reasoning and collaborative skills, as do many of their graduating students. They are the blind leading the blind.

Why do so many educators point to the NRA as one of the culprits of school-place shootings when there is absolutely no empirical evidence that the NRA has anything to do with it (not one mass shooter has been an NRA member?)

The answer is simple: Our ‘Progressive’ educational culture looks for scapegoats and trains victims. It is a convenient way to perpetuate social dependence on unions and government and their related low responsibility, high benefit, taxpayer-funded jobs.

One administrator flatly stated President Trump was beholden to the NRA so he would never take any action to ban assault weapons. One of Trump’s main voter attractions was that he was not ‘owned’ by anybody. He self-funded his campaign, but the Progressive movement seldom lets facts get in the way of inflammatory rhetoric.

What Trump and other pragmatists are suggesting is to simply allow some teachers and administrators, or even volunteer retired military or law enforcement veterans, to quietly and unobtrusively arm themselves on campus. By letting it be known that there is potentially armed resistance on school grounds, we could see the same kind of diminution of student shootings as we have seen in airline industry terrorism since we put Homeland Security guards in the terminals and armed marshals on some passenger planes.

Have you noticed educators or advertisers criticizing or boycotting the airline industry?

Teachers who “cannot imagine having that responsibility of carrying a gun” can focus on what teachers do, but the teachers and administrators who are seriously interested in protecting their students should have the ability to learn how to handle firearms. Let them do what they can and want to do. Denying them that right is aiding and abetting psychopathic social misfits who are preying on irrational fears and purely political naivete.

*Note: Opinions expressed by columnists and letter writers are those of the writers and not necessarily those of the newspaper.

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