Now and again a waft of fresh untainted air blows in, usually from places far away from Foggy Bottom where there hasn't been a breath of fresh air in years. This from Indiana shows that some people still have a brain and are able to use it:
legislation approved Tuesday by the [Indiana] House Education Committee would mandate the creation of a protection officer for each school. With proper training, those officers could be principals, teachers, staff members, police officers or security guards.
They don't have to be police officers, thankfully. We're becoming more and more a garrison state as it is and to condition young people that this is somehow “normal” isn't useful. But having a teacher step forward and accept the additional responsibility – training and education in defense in the classroom, just like fire drills – makes nothing but sense.
So says Rep. Jim Lucas, a freshman Republican: “This is a common sense approach to a horrible situation.” At Sandy Hook Elementary School, he said, “these people were defenseless. We know for a fact that [at] Sandy Hook they did everything by the book: the school was locked down, the shooter came in, broke dozens of laws and shot his way into the school.”
In retrospect if someone – anyone – had had the training Indiana is now considering, Sandy Hook would have been just another footnote in Cato's book, Tough Targets, a compilation of eight years of researching reports of self defense which concluded first, that the vast majority of those carrying firearms “are ethical and competent” and that “tens of thousands of crimes are prevented each year by ordinary citizens with guns.”
There are those who disagree with Lucas, who think that guns are inherently dangerous, especially in classrooms where all manner of trouble is conjured by anti-gunners. Listen to Teresa Meredith, a hoplophobe who is also the vice president of the Indiana State Teachers Association:
I can't imagine trying to manage 28 to 30 children by myself and manage a loaded weapon on my body somewhere, and be able to deal with a potential intruder and keep the kids safe.
Without spending a lot of time on where “on her body” she might carry a firearm (i. e., for more on where Sandra Bullock carries a firearm on her body, see The Blind Side for that), a more reasonable question Meredith might ask is, “If I can handle a fire extinguisher while herding the kids out the door during a fire drill, surely I can handle (with proper training, of course) something as simple to operate as a semi-automatic pistol, can't I, especially if my kids' lives were at stake?”
The bill still has to be debated by the House and then considered by the state Senate before it can reach the governor's desk. But this is the first sign of intelligent life that gives rise to the possibility that there might be more out there somewhere, likely to be in places far away from Foggy Bottom.
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