Recently (in the post FEDERAL GUN PERMIT) I speculated about how the country might accommodate the entire text of the Second Amendment. Detailing the permitting process, I failed to mention background checks, which would certainly be a part of determining if a candidate were militia-ready—and hence available for gun ownership.
All for naught, of course, because the Supreme Court has already drawn a line through the first half of the amendment.
(The Second Amendment probably made sense at the time it was written, back when the country had no standing army and no state-based National Guards. It's been obsolete for a long time.)
Now President Trump is championing the idea of arming teachers to solve the rampant school-shooting problem. He seems to like the notion very much. Trump imagines that teachers, who universally love their students, would be in a unique position to blast armed ruffians at the first sign of trouble. Cops and school guards, who obviously don't give a damn about the students, run a distant second.
But how would it actually work?
Say you're teaching a biology class, giving your students the benefit of your perspective gained in a twenty-year career in the Marines, time spent gunning down miscreants all around the world. You hear gunfire across the campus. Do you grab your smoke-wagon and hit the hallway—abandoning your beloved charges—to seek out someone to nail (maybe another armed teacher with the same idea)?
Or do you herd your kids into a corner of the classroom where they can't be seen through the window in the door, then stand beside that locked door with your gun out, waiting for the target to come to you?
I think it would be a question of school policy.
One thing is certain, if there's gunfire, that means the shooter is already in the building, getting his grisly work done.
On the shooter's side of the equation, it works like this: Enter a classroom, immediately kill the teacher (who might be armed), then go to town on the kids.
The shooter always get one free classroom to work his vengeful magic. Nobody—not cops nor guards nor armed teachers—can know anything is afoot until the firing starts. Finished in the first classroom, the shooter goes back into the hallway to see how things play out.
Risky? Sure, but what does he care? Nearly all shooters wind up dead, often by their own hand. Remember, they're playing out an endgame scenario. They expect to die, no matter what.
So, armed teachers or not, armed guards or not, police on campus or not, the shooter gets his one free classroom full of kids. And frankly that's going to be enough. He's already made his peace with it.
Result: no change to school shootings.
Trump thinks if would-be shooters knew there were armed teachers inside, they would stay out. More likely, they'd see it as an added bonus. A challenge.
Besides, if that worked, you wouldn't need to have armed teachers, just signs out front of the school saying there were armed teachers inside:
ONE OUT OF FIVE TEACHERS IS PACKING HEAT. YOU FEEL LUCKY, PUNK?
One way to deny shooters their free classroom is to keep doors locked during class. But that would only force the shooter to wait for class changes, which—in middle and high school—occur every hour. Then they could blast the students while they're crowding the hallway. Less spacing, more random wounding. It's a good thing, really.
Or, if he's too pumped up to wait, the shooter could pull the fire alarm—which is what happened in Parkland, Florida.
Clearly, any situation that lets an armed shooter into the building is going to end with a substantial body count. You have to keep those guys outside, and only high walls and checkpoints can do that.
Maybe.
Because shooters with luck on their sides could still probably blast their way inside. Not to mention shooters who pair up with other guys. A breech by a determined force of heavily armed teenagers would be hard to deny.
And even keeping shooters outside the schools is not a complete solution. Snipers can kill kids in the schoolyard or out on the athletic field, or fire through windows into classrooms. To fix this we're talking a whole new generation of schools, built along the lines of super-max prisons.
But that just puts pressure on all the other soft targets where teenagers hang out, like malls and movie theaters.
Sorry, Mr. Trump, but the real solution to shooters is to disarm them ahead of time. Your proposal to strap guns onto teachers has only one redeeming quality (as seen from your point of view): It doesn't require you to discomfort the National Rifle Association in any significant way.
The NRA has the President and most members of Congress under its thumb. It offers the carrot of helping those guys get reelected and the stick of ruining everybody's political careers if they don't cooperate.
But there is a magic bullet that can kill the beast: term limits.
If nobody in the Executive or Legislative Branch was facing reelection, the NRA would hold no power over anybody.
One term, and out. For everybody.
That would put an end to the very concept of "political career." It could also be the salvation of this country.
Democracy means giving the people what they want—not weighing that "opinion" against the wishes of powerful lobbies. If the people in a given district want their representative to vote a certain way, it should be illegal for the guy to vote any other way.
(Another way to eliminate reelection, the superhighway on which the rich and powerful zoom to and fro, is to make the job permanent—like a seat on the Supreme Court. But I suspect this method would just elevate the "old boy network" into outer space, and who needs that?)
Realistically, the idea of term limits is probably a pipe dream. We'd need to fight another revolution and start over with a new country. (Maybe one with no pesky Second Amendment.)
In the meantime, putting a higher age limit on gun buying might help, though disturbed teenagers could still get guns illegally or grab dad's hunting rifle. And anger can outlast any attempt at maturity gained by simply living a few years longer.
I know, it's starting to sound hopeless. But look, even though human beings are inherently dangerous, it doesn't mean we should give up trying to make things safer.
We may still have a little time left before North Korea starts the war that ends all life on this planet.
No comments:
Post a Comment