No, not the unrelenting plethora of mass shootings. Not any more, anyway. Nor the non-response of our politicians, bought and paid for by the NRA. Not even all the excuses they find why it's not guns that kill people, it's mentally ill people, and we don't dare infringe on anybody's right even so to carry around at will enough armament to end the war in Syria. (If only!) It's not like the Brits are going to come back and recolonize this country like our founding fathers justly feared back when the Bill of Rights was written to support a standing militia.
What might actually be a surprise to some folks is the failure of that tired mantra that the way to stop a bad guy (note they never say "bad woman") with a gun is a good guy (they still never say "woman") with a gun. Arm everybody, and nobody gets hurt. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that?
Cops hate that idea. Shouldn't that give you the first clue? If they arrive at a free-for-all firestorm, nobody's wearing the hat or vest or something that says "but I'm the good guy here, shooting the bad... oops, well mostly bad, anyway ... guys." As far as the cops would be concerned, it would be a perfectly justified time to fall back on that oldie about shooting them all and sorting it out later.
So it's a school: arm the teachers? That means they have to go through not just gun safety and use training, they also have to go through desensitization training to enable them to take aim on your son or daughter with no reservations about killing them. Or no reservations about killing the kid next to them just because their aim is lousy under the stress of a shooting situation. So, they gotta learn to be the bad guy in order to be the good guy? Really? This is who we want in our classrooms when tempers rise and chaos rules, nevermind whether anybody else brought a gun to school? This is how we want to make it easier for that disturbed pissed-off kid to grab a loaded weapon without needing to have the forethought and motivation to bring their own gun from home, by having it right there in the room?
But even if we can pretend, under whatever twisted fear-driven "logic", that the good-guy-with-a-gun scenario is the way to go, it still depends on one thing, and as we just found out, even that can fail. Not all designated good guys with guns are actually willing, regardless of duty, regardless of occupation, regardless of honor, to go be that person!
It happens in war. It happens on the police force. With or without guns being involved, it happens in every situation in life. Some people just hang back and don't step up and try to help. I mean, if they did, wouldn't those we call heroes just be ordinary instead of extraordinary? So why on earth should it be a surprise that a hired school security officer hung back for 4 minutes while more and more kids got shot in Florida?
So what's your next dumb excuse?
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