Vulnerable schools need protection
Guns, training for teachers may be answer

It’s an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, so perhaps I was holding out TOO much hope. Nevertheless, it’s a good start to see this kind of piece.

Thirty-nine students attend my American literature seminar this semester. Our classroom is the first one you see on the left, as you enter the unlocked humanities building.

If a psychotic gunman were searching for a tight cluster of multiple bodies — an easy target for seeking revenge, casting out demons, achieving immortality or whatever else his perverse purpose happens to be — he would find my classroom door wide open. He could assume a position straddling the threshold and blocking the exit, so that he could fire at the trapped students at will, reload his weapon and fire once again. We would be sitting ducks in yet another American schoolhouse tragedy.

But if I were packing a loaded automatic pistol in a shoulder holster beneath my jacket, we might have half a chance.

An actual logical argument from one of America’s liberal brain-washing institutions universities. I feel shock.

I am no Rambo. I am a middle-age English professor with no military background. But as an outdoorsman, I have a passing acquaintance with the use of firearms, experience which could be refined to a skill of safety and competence, with adequate training.

Years in classroom management in urban high schools, colleges and universities makes me attuned and alert to every individual, and their comings and goings in my classroom.

And because of the responsibility I feel toward my students, I would do whatever I could to protect their lives, even without a weapon. So why not arm me and give them a reasonable chance?

Commendable.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay expressing skepticism about arming school personnel. But that was before the mass murders at Virginia Tech, Louisiana Technical College and Northern Illinois University, among others.

My perspective has changed because the country is changing cataclysmically. The rash of cold-blooded serial killings on campuses is now less an anomaly than a wave of terror. It demands new initiatives to safeguard the lives of people seeking a college education.

Additional locks, and a text messaging system that says, “Hey, someone just had their brains blown out in Lecture Hall 1B. Run!” don’t do the trick. It’s good that those sorts of methods are being exposed as the janitorial clean-up tasks they are.

I remain adamantly opposed to permitting students to carry concealed weapons. The prospect of thousands of teenage and 20-something students carrying guns on college campuses is only asking for trouble.

I disagree and I think here is where the whole “misguided” thing falls apart. Why is it the argument comes up that every drunken panty-raider in a frat is going to be running around with a loaded pistol and no idea how to use it? Non-violent, responsible students will (for the most part) be the ones carrying. Just like the majority of adults carrying are non-violent and responsible. Someone respecting the law, going through the process, and taking the proper steps to get their conceal permit and know their weapon are not the same as some gang-banging thug who holds the damn thing sideways and can’t hit the broad side of a low-income housing complex in a 2 mph drive by.

But training and equipping seasoned adults, who also happen to be select and exhaustively screened college professors, is a hopeful solution.

Select and exhaustively screened? Booooooo! Now you’re leaving it up to the elites to determine who is worthy and that’s a damn slippery slope.

I am not suggesting arming all teachers. I have had many brilliant colleagues, who are my betters when it comes to teaching, who, nonetheless, do not inspire trust when they use the office paper cutter, let alone a 9 mm Glock.

Those are the same teachers who will undoubtedly wet themselves passing you in the hallway, by the way. So I don’t think there’s a chance they’re going to willingly or unwillingly be armed. They’ll quit first citing socialist principle and a hatred and unnatural fear of mechanical death machines.

Finally:

And I believe that, as a father, if I’m apprised that coach Jones in the gym building, and professor Maddox in the arts center, and Dr. Heinz in the science lab, have all volunteered for weapons training, because they wanted to protect the lives of my children, I would sleep a lot better at night.

Non-PSH. At least to some degree.

It’s a good start, but there’s a lot of work to do.