Sorry I’m late to this, but I’ve been away for the afternoon and early evening doing Christmas shopping and seeing “The Hobbit” (it was good!). I caught this story on the radio on the way home:
After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country. It pointed the finger at violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement — not guns — as culprits in the recent rash of mass shootings.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters.
This is a special kind of crazy. As others were quick to note, Columbine High School did have an armed guard, which didn’t prevent Klebold and Harris from carrying out their massacre. Sure, an armed security guard might have stopped Adam Lanza, but Adam Lanza might have killed the security guard before the guard had a chance to draw his gun.
When I say this is a “special kind of crazy,” I mean the idea that America is now a place where we entertain the idea that we need men with guns roaming the halls of our elementary schools to keep kids safe. If that is true, then we are a morally insane country. I don’t think it is true, but man, LaPierre is getting his Hobbes on bigtime. I can’t figure out if he’s really that paranoid, or really that cynical.
William Dalton 
The Wet One 
Liam 
The NRA should be about reducing public concern over these once in a hundred million occurrences of madmen taking firearms and mowing down students at school. To call for having armed guards at every school is as asinine as our airport regimen of putting every passenger through x-rays and pat-down searches. The only sane response to 9-11 was to make it impossible for any terrorist to gain entry to the cockpit of a plane. More than that was completely unnecessary. Would it still be possible for someone to carry a bomb onto a plane? Yes. The only ones who are harmed, directly, are those on the plane – just as is the case on those other rare occasions when planes crash. It is part and parcel of the vagaries of life, to ensure against we teach people to trust in God. So it is for parents who send their kids off to school, or church, or to visit friends every day of their lives. Their are a dozen difference reasons that day they may never again see their child alive. Thankfully, we can live with the knowledge that such a thing is among the remotest of possibilities. The massacre in Newtown doesn’t change that calculation. As in it’s response to 9/11, the American people are proving they still haven’t grown up. They are adolescents who expect their “parents”, the government, to make everything in life nice and safe for them. Well, that’s not a parent’s job and it’s not the government’s job. When are we going to start hearing and seeing public office holders, even the NRA, start acting like adults and saying so?