If Corporations are People, How come they don’t feel shame? If Corporations are People, where is their natural regret, guilt and remorse? These are direct questions for the NRA and gun lobbyist’s proposing to have more guns in our schools.
Wow, you really have to be kidding! More guns in our schools! Fight violence with violence? Really?! Deal with gun massacres by increasing guns so they exist visually everywhere for our children to see and fantasize about. It’s like saying that the adults and parents and teachers are so weak and ineffectual, unimaginative, and powerless that even they will resort to guns as a solution to the gun problem. We “grown-ups” can’t come up with a better more involved solution for our children? Wow, that really sucks. And that is the message it will give.
Inside the classroom, the message to students will be: we can’t handle you; we don’t trust you or ourselves to handle you; you are not entirely responsible for your own behavior so we have a policeman to do it.
For sure, having more guns in our schools benefits Gun lobbies and the NRA, and our Prison, Military Industrial Complex. But, having more guns in our schools has nothing to do with educating children or assisting our deteriorating educational system. Guns in our schools will actually do the opposite, creating an atmosphere of fear, distrust and prejudice. It does not even come close to addressing the deeper problems, issues and hypocrisies that have led to school gun violence, i.e., what is going in inside our children’s minds? Are they getting enough attention? nurturance, support, stimulation from learning? Are they being abused or neglected? Are we paying attention to the signs of a student needing attention? if anything, we need more counselors, more trauma therapists’, more communication, more mentors, Big Brothers and Sisters’, and more active involvement by parents as well as teachers. We need more teachers! Not policeman!
It is very worrisome but likely to assume that, due to the workload of our teachers, the discipline of our children will be put in the hands of untrained but armed policeman; classrooms will be turned into military settings, in which learning and fear will become increasingly associated.
Putting guns and armed guards in our schools is a short-term reaction formation, as well as outright violent collusion with the collective wish already ingrained in our youth, ‘that guns will solve our problems’. Not to mention that not all policeman are the same.
What if a student with ADHD decides to act out and “test” a police officer? And, what if that police officer handles this by taking out his gun? What message will that give to students’? What if a police officer is biased against certain children or racist and harasses children of color or girls more often than other children? How do we explain that to our own children? We have no guarantee of the mental health or ethical character of our police officers’ as exemplified by so many profiling abuses and deaths across the Country.
This is not only a short-sighted and deeply flawed idea being proposed by those who have the most to gain, at the expense of the kinds of environments’ that encourage and nurture learning, but it is a crazy idea with very concerning consequences we haven’t even begun to think through.
I say a resounding, earth shattering “NO” to guns in our schools.
