“If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”–Genghis Khan (who didn’t need no stinkin’ 2nd Amendment)
You don’t have to go to a gun shop or even a gun show to find a gun in the USA. You don’t even have to leave your house, just do a web search like “guns for sale.”
Most proposed solutions to America’s epidemic of mass killings do nothing to address the fact that it is easier to get a gun than an automobile, which requires a driver’s license, safety inspection, registration and license plates.
But cars are not defended from being regulated in the Constitution because, like assault rifles, they hadn’t yet been invented.
After each mass shooting at schools, NRA spokespersons are given the corporate media megaphones to present their view (as though it were a sensible balance) that all we have to do to prevent school shootings is arm the teachers.
But the silliest of gun rights “solutions” is to arm teachers. One must ask, “Where would a teacher keep a loaded gun?” Unless she had the gun cocked and aimed at the classroom door, with a willingness to immediately kill whoever enters, she couldn’t be sure that a potential mass-shooter wouldn’t have the drop on her.
If she kept the gun in her desk drawer, it would have to be locked, requiring her to go through her purse looking for the key, giving the shooter a good fifteen-second head start—enough time to fire several bullets.
Even if she were to keep the gun on her person, she wouldn’t have the element of surprise. The lone wolf shooter is the only one who knows in advance the murder spree about to take place, and he would certainly shoot first the person most likely to go after a gun—the only adult in the room. We’ve seen this at Sandy Hook and we’ve seen it at Uvalde.
Until there are a lot of bodies to prove it, how would someone know that a mass shooting is about to need preventing, by shooting the shooter? The “arming teachers” solution is not a solution, unless one only cares about revenge after a slaughter has taken place, but most of us would see this as too little too late.
The only reasonable solution is to make it more difficult to obtain guns, and outlaw weapons of war which are excessive for hunting or protecting one’s home.
Large ammunition clips should also be banned. If it takes a person thirty rounds to kill a deer, they should not be hunting, they should be looking for a seeing-eye dog.
Many of the Founding Fathers were against keeping a standing army, something they thought we could ill-afford. They were for citizens keeping a musket so that an army could be quickly put together were there an attack by foreigners. Today we have a huge standing army and the lethality of combat weapons far exceeds the wildest nightmares of those who wrote the Second Amendment. I would bet that the Founders would not want modern combat weapons to be so easily purchased (and many of them likely would be for shutting down our massive, expensive military, which no longer merely “defends” the nation, as many of them opposed foreign wars). They would certainly oppose all 800+ U.S. military bases located abroad.
A national list of people deemed too dangerous to have guns should be kept by the ATF or FBI, and checked before a gun may be sold anywhere in the nation. This list should be regularly updated with the names of people convicted of violent crimes, psychopaths and others deemed mentally unstable as identified by psychiatrists. It is not enough to depend on states to do this, as we’ve seen mass-killers cross state lines to buy a gun.
Since so many of the mass-shooters are under the age of 21, a national law should be passed making this the age at which one may buy a gun.
A national red flag law must be put into effect so that those threatening to kill people can have their guns taken away from them by law enforcement officers before the shooting takes place.
Lastly, we should be studying gun violence to find the best solutions to prevent it. Unfortunately Congress passed a law signed by President Bill Clinton making it difficult to study gun violence, to the delight of the NRA.
Sane people must applaud the meager gun control legislation that recently was passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Biden, although it didn’t go far enough.
In a nation with so many guns, nothing will stop any possibility of a mass shooting, but we must begin to seriously address the issue. If only one life is saved, any attempt is worth it. And, if they could do it, the irresponsible NRA would seemingly ensure that every redneck had his own thermonuclear warhead.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.
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The futility of arming teachers
Posted on August 9, 2022 by Jack Balkwill
You don’t have to go to a gun shop or even a gun show to find a gun in the USA. You don’t even have to leave your house, just do a web search like “guns for sale.”
Most proposed solutions to America’s epidemic of mass killings do nothing to address the fact that it is easier to get a gun than an automobile, which requires a driver’s license, safety inspection, registration and license plates.
But cars are not defended from being regulated in the Constitution because, like assault rifles, they hadn’t yet been invented.
After each mass shooting at schools, NRA spokespersons are given the corporate media megaphones to present their view (as though it were a sensible balance) that all we have to do to prevent school shootings is arm the teachers.
But the silliest of gun rights “solutions” is to arm teachers. One must ask, “Where would a teacher keep a loaded gun?” Unless she had the gun cocked and aimed at the classroom door, with a willingness to immediately kill whoever enters, she couldn’t be sure that a potential mass-shooter wouldn’t have the drop on her.
If she kept the gun in her desk drawer, it would have to be locked, requiring her to go through her purse looking for the key, giving the shooter a good fifteen-second head start—enough time to fire several bullets.
Even if she were to keep the gun on her person, she wouldn’t have the element of surprise. The lone wolf shooter is the only one who knows in advance the murder spree about to take place, and he would certainly shoot first the person most likely to go after a gun—the only adult in the room. We’ve seen this at Sandy Hook and we’ve seen it at Uvalde.
Until there are a lot of bodies to prove it, how would someone know that a mass shooting is about to need preventing, by shooting the shooter? The “arming teachers” solution is not a solution, unless one only cares about revenge after a slaughter has taken place, but most of us would see this as too little too late.
The only reasonable solution is to make it more difficult to obtain guns, and outlaw weapons of war which are excessive for hunting or protecting one’s home.
Large ammunition clips should also be banned. If it takes a person thirty rounds to kill a deer, they should not be hunting, they should be looking for a seeing-eye dog.
Many of the Founding Fathers were against keeping a standing army, something they thought we could ill-afford. They were for citizens keeping a musket so that an army could be quickly put together were there an attack by foreigners. Today we have a huge standing army and the lethality of combat weapons far exceeds the wildest nightmares of those who wrote the Second Amendment. I would bet that the Founders would not want modern combat weapons to be so easily purchased (and many of them likely would be for shutting down our massive, expensive military, which no longer merely “defends” the nation, as many of them opposed foreign wars). They would certainly oppose all 800+ U.S. military bases located abroad.
A national list of people deemed too dangerous to have guns should be kept by the ATF or FBI, and checked before a gun may be sold anywhere in the nation. This list should be regularly updated with the names of people convicted of violent crimes, psychopaths and others deemed mentally unstable as identified by psychiatrists. It is not enough to depend on states to do this, as we’ve seen mass-killers cross state lines to buy a gun.
Since so many of the mass-shooters are under the age of 21, a national law should be passed making this the age at which one may buy a gun.
A national red flag law must be put into effect so that those threatening to kill people can have their guns taken away from them by law enforcement officers before the shooting takes place.
Lastly, we should be studying gun violence to find the best solutions to prevent it. Unfortunately Congress passed a law signed by President Bill Clinton making it difficult to study gun violence, to the delight of the NRA.
Sane people must applaud the meager gun control legislation that recently was passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Biden, although it didn’t go far enough.
In a nation with so many guns, nothing will stop any possibility of a mass shooting, but we must begin to seriously address the issue. If only one life is saved, any attempt is worth it. And, if they could do it, the irresponsible NRA would seemingly ensure that every redneck had his own thermonuclear warhead.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.