Missouri wants to allow teachers to bring guns to school. A rural school district in Texas encourages teachers to bring guns to school.
This is nuts. First of all, let me say this much: Any teacher who wants to bring a gun to school should be summarily discharged as dispositionally unsuited for the job of teaching -- either that, or a total moron, which similarly disqualifies him from the teaching profession. As I've pointed out before, the logistics don't work. It's impossible to keep a weapon concealed from kids if you have it on your person -- those little bastardsangels are sharp, they'll eventually figure out where you're hiding your weapon, and then the temptation to steal"borrow" the weapon to play with it will happen. Meaning that to keep it safe from the kids, you'd have to put it in a locked drawer where it does fuckall good to protect yourself or your class if Little Johnny snaps and starts shooting up the school.
And even if you can get to the weapon, real teachers simply are not dispositionally suited to effectively use a gun against a student. A gun is only useful if you're willing and able to kill someone with it without flinching and without hesitation. Teachers are teachers because they love working with kids, not because they like killing the little bastardsangels. I mean, it sure the hell isn't because of the astounding pay -- since I left teaching I've never made less than double the amount of money that I made while teaching. While teachers might mutter about how rude, disorderly, and lazy today's little jerksscholars are, the fact of the matter is that most are still teaching because they like the little assholesparagons of virtue. And it's damned hard to kill someone that you like, unless you're a deranged psychopath, and I sure the hell hope we don't have deranged psychopaths working as teachers in our schools. Given that most school shooters are children, the notion of a teacher with a gun being effective against a school shooter doesn't pass the laugh and giggle test -- all that a teacher with a gun is, if faced with an armed student, is a dead body who will provide an additional weapon and additional ammo to the shooter.
Let's face it, a teacher serving as a cop is a stupid idea. The two jobs simply are too different. A cop's job is, amongst other things, to deal with violent threats to public safety. A teacher's job is to educate the little miscreantsangels. If it's decided that anybody within the school should be armed, it should be people who are professionally trained at law enforcement -- not teachers. A teacher's job is to teach, not to kill. 'Nuff said on that.
-- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
A bad idea indeed . I remember my High Schol class of 71 . As probably most schools do we had our "mad scientist" . An otherwise brilliant nerd who just happened to love blowing shit up . I last heard he had a scholarship to Cornwell or something like that . I can just imagine the time he sent a school trash can about 4 feet up with a big boom , and (then) out would come a half dozen pistols ? Poor guy never would of got to graduate high school .
ReplyDeleteKids killing kids is bad enough , you can't add the teachers to the mayhem .
a serious w3ski
Guns don't kill people. Dumbass rednecks with guns kill people.
ReplyDeleteHow about what happens the first time some teacher shoots one of the Hispanic students "cuz I thunk the little beaner had a knife"?
BTW, just found this: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090518/ap_on_re_us/us_louisiana_school_shooting_7
ReplyDeleteThis would have started a real firefight if the teachers had been armed.
Well, since the line was truncated...
ReplyDeletehttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090518/ap_on_re_us/
us_louisiana_school_shooting_7
BT - Off topic - and I apologise...My dad was a High School teacher. One of his favorite stories was of a shop teacher who was walking down the hall and observed a student with an unlit cigarete in his mouth. Without breaking stride, he plucked the contraband returning only to reply to the students loud objections.
ReplyDeleteAfter listening for a while the teacher summed it up. "So you think you're not being treted like an adult?". "Right!" said the student, who was standing in front of his open upper locker. The shop teacher briskly swung the open door into the students forhead, not enough to break skin or even raise a goose egg, but a surprise.
"There - how do you like being treated like an adult?" And the teacher walked off with the cigarette.
I've always had mixed feelings about the story. On the one hand, I don't endorse abusing children. On the other hand, the school represented an environment for the benefit of students which the City of San Jose had a right to regulate in terms of conduct. If ya student suggests there should be no rules, well, he got a brief trial run of that environment.
At this time a lot of those students graduated High School to an all-expense-paid trip to Viet Nam, a country of few schools and few rules where life was cheap and learning how unfair life could be was a brutal lesson.
There is a precedent for this sort of foolishness. In the early 60's when my hometown bus company was forced to remove the signs directing persons of varying colors to sit in different parts of the bus, the city replaced those signs with new ones proclaiming that "the operator of this bus is a duly sworn police officer".
ReplyDeleteJust goes to show that pigheaded stupidity is timeless