What if educators do not want to be armed?
Insanity is often defined as the process of repeating the same thing over and over, yet each time expecting a different result. When found in a cyclical state of repetitive failure, the remedy — at least in my opinion — is to turn around and go another direction. Continuing to try to make a flawed system work fails its own litmus at the outset almost without fail.
At present, this is where you will find me on the hot-button topic of gun rights in America and the correlation between them and the slaughtering of innocent people — school children, no less.
And in the process of this debate, there is some headway being made by the youth of our nation in the aftermath of the shooting in Florida this past February. I stress that only some progress is being made as the same tired arguments are being made from all sides.
But with the need for a sensible solution, I want to address here the notion that arming school teachers is what is needed to protect children. With the tacit understanding that there may in fact be educators willing to take this on, I can say from my own experience having relationships with a good number of them that this is a patently absurd idea.
Furthermore, it raises an important question: What if educators simply do not want to be armed?
Will the advocates for unlimited freedom in the world of firearms such as the NRA employ their sizable lobbying influence on legislators, seeking to make it a mandate? Will the natural fallout of qualified and passionate educators who simply walk away in lieu of compliance be the implantation of some sort of drafting of people to take their place? Where will they receive their close-quarters combat training and hone not only firearms expertise but the unique presence of mind necessary to maintain one’s composure when being fired upon?
This simply is not a solution at all but rather the ill-fated and mentally stunted musings of a mindset that refuses to acquiesce the gravity of the problem and where perhaps some of the responsibility lies for having created it in the first place.
What must happen — what is happening — is that the debate is being thrust into the public sphere in a way not seen for some time. The children themselves have taken the proverbial stand, saying, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
And what a force to be reckoned with they are.
Let this simmer some. There will be plenty of time for the debate to constitute in a fashion likened to that of a free society going through the pangs of growth by trial and error.
One final thought: To paraphrase a statement made by Dan Rather, if you are one of those who derides the debate altogether — if you are one of those who seeks to silence the voices of those youth or any other for that matter, whether they agree with you our not — then you have no place in a civil society. You are either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid to think that such a response has ever had anything other than a catastrophic outcome on free societies in histories past.
See you out there.
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