Schools Need to Change to be Safe

http://setourchildrenfree.com/blog.html

01/07/2013

I walked a mile to my elementary school when I was a kid, a mile home for lunch, a mile back in the afternoon, and a mile home after school. Four miles total every school day, rain, snow, or shine. No, I am not trying to say how tough it was when I was in school. I’m trying to illustrate that these days, no parent in their right mind would let their kids walk a mile to school by themselves in any neighborhood unless they had no choice. It would be considered dangerous and irresponsible to not either drive their child to school, or have a trusted adult hover over them until the school bus arrives. My point is that we can’t live in the past, and we have to change with the times as society changes. When I was a kid, there were no school shootings, even though kids brought guns to school and left them in the principal’s office so they could hunt squirrels on the way home. In fact, when I was in college, we kept handguns and rifles in our rooms with the full knowledge and permission of school officials, and not one round was ever fired on school grounds. We can argue all day about why we have so many evil wackos who decide to kill innocent children, but we’re stuck with them for the present, and pretending they’re not out there is playing a foolish and deadly form of Russian roulette. Yet that is exactly the game gun control advocates insist that we play by mandating that all schools be gun-free zones.
What has changed since I went to school? Not the gun. As I pointed out earlier, guns were even more prevalent in schools back then, yet there were no shootings. What has changed is the kinds of people that roam our society. It’s a fact that about 80% of these mass murderers were under the influence of psychiatric drugs – a fact that the news media tries to ignore. If we’re looking for a common factor in these shootings that was not present a generation ago, look no further than the over-prescribing of anti-depressant medications. So why are we trying to regulate the gun? The cities and states that have the strictest gun control laws also have the highest rates of gun violence, and the states with liberal concealed carry laws have seen the greatest drop in violent crime. That is the inconvenient truth, and the statistics are too often lost in this emotional debate. An armed populace is a deterrent to violent crime, not the reason for it.
And it should be clear to anyone who has a brain, that in every one of these shootings, the shooter broke multiple gun laws, which illustrates yet another obvious point – criminals don’t obey gun laws. All gun control laws do is disarm law abiding citizens, which makes the criminal’s job that much easier. Even many countries that prohibit gun ownership entirely have high rates of gun violence because (repeat after me) CRIMINALS DON’T OBEY THE LAW, and they will always be able to get guns just like they can always get illegal drugs. So if gun control is not the problem, they why do the usual suspects demand more gun control before the dead victims’ bodies are even cold? It’s because their real agenda is not child safety at all, but disarming the public. If you doubt that, just listen to what the leftist elites say when they’re being honest (a rarity), and they’ll readily admit this. Notice, however, that they don’t think these rules should apply to them, as evidenced by the bodyguards who regularly accompany the media anchors and Hollywood celebrities, and of course, the Secret Service agents assigned to our top government officials.
So what’s the answer? I’ll answer that by asking a simple question: Why do these shooters head for schools instead of police stations when they want to commit mass murder? The answer is obvious, although the news media will try to hide even the obvious. Case in point – Did you hear about the shooting in a San Antonio movie theater two days after the Sandy Hook shooting? Probably not, because it is one of many instances, including the Ft. Hood shooting, and the Colorado Springs church shooting, where a single armed good guy (or in these three instances, a good girl) with a gun, stopped a bad guy with a gun. Clearly, all of these mass murderers have one thing in common - they choose targets where they know they will meet no resistance, i.e. a gun-free zone. Arm and train school personnel and/or station private armed security/police in our schools and you will change the equation. Don’t tell me we can’t afford it, because most middle and high schools already have school resource officers there full time, and we spend much more federal money on other useless education nonsense like Race to the Top stimulus funds. Many school districts have already implemented this policy without any additional funds. And don’t tell me teachers and principals can’t defend their schools with guns, because they’ve been doing it very effectively for years in Israel and Thailand, where they face down determined terrorists, not just the occasional wacko.
Also lost in the emotion of this debate is why citizens need to be armed in the first place. The 250 million people who were killed by their own government in the 20th Century could answer that for us if they could talk. Thanks to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and other dictators who believed in gun control, those quarter billion folks will not be here to testify. That’s about five or six times as many people killed in all of the wars of that century by the way. In other words, citizens should rightly fear their own government more than a foreign invader. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to bear arms, but the right of self-defense precedes even the Constitution. However, the Second Amendment is not about self defense or even hunting, even though those are legitimate reasons for owning firearms. The Founders made it abundantly clear that the Second Amendment was about preserving freedom by assuring that the government of the people and by the people would stay that way. Guns were to be our insurance policy against tyranny by our own government, and no less a liberal than Hubert H. Humphrey admitted the same. Whenever this particular argument against gun control is raised, it is usually dismissed for the reason that gun owners wouldn’t stand a chance against the might of the American military. For those who believe this, I would simply submit two close-to-home examples: the American Revolution and the Vietnam War. History is filled with many other grass roots uprisings where a small, outnumbered and outgunned, but determined populace, overcame enormous odds to overthrow what they perceived as an unjust government. I am not suggesting we should start a revolution, because other options are available, and that is always the last option. But thanks to the Second Amendment, it is an option.