THREE! TWO! ONE! CLANG!
There's been a lot of discussion around my school about Trump's proposal to arm teachers so they can prevent classroom massacres and everyone I know with any kind of brain thinks this is a lunatic proposition; for those who don't think that, I have a metaphor that might explain why this gun-lover's fantasy is so preposterous . . . at every basketball practice, at least once a session, there's a kid who counts down THREE! TWO! ONE! and chucks a half-court shot at the rim; he's imagining the ultimate scenario, of course-- his team is down by two points with .6 seconds left in regulation and he hurls a shot from sixty feet and swishes it, winning the game; while this is a compelling fantasy, in reality the shot inevitably hits someone in the head; ruins the transition from one drill to the next; and sets everyone else off their game . . . while this scenario does occasionally happen in an actual game, it is very very rare, and not something that necessarily warrants practice, and the collateral damage when a kid does this at practice is usually fairly ugly, so coaches discourage it; of course, I empathize with the kids, it's fun to pretend . . . but I don't empathize with adults who indulge in such fantasies: they obviously imagine some perfectly romanticized school shooter scenario where they spot a mad gunman in the distance, lining up innocent school girls in his sights, and this shooter doesn't notice the heroic marksman, the good guy with a concealed weapon, who takes careful aim with his well-maintained, carefully oiled piece, calmly fires, and drops the shooter in his tracks . . . THREE! TWO! ONE! . . . just before the shooter does any damage; I'm not sure if this scenario has ever happened, but I do know for certain that the more guns are the present, the more deaths happen, whether by suicide, accident, or collateral damage, and the chance that even an armed and trained person would come the the rescue is pretty slim . . . so let's leave the fantasizing to the children and recognize that the answer to gun violence is not more guns; there are good people and there are bad people, and-- as Neil Postman reminds us: there are good technologies and bad technologies . . . it took a while to recognize cigarettes as a bad technology, and as much as the 2nd Amendment folks hate to hear it, it's time to admit that guns are not a technology to embrace and worship either
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
based on the headline, i thought this was going to be a sentence about the nicks. i feel a bit misled.
If teachers are going to be armed then school districts will have to pay for the guns, bullets, gun maintenance, and teacher training.
If guns are stored in classrooms then schools will become targets for gun thieves, so schools will have to invest in secure gun lockers.
If a teachers shoots a gun and accidentally hits a student or another teacher then the student's or other teacher's family will sue the school district, so school districts will have to get some sort of shooting insurance.
If school systems don't have the money to pay for crayons and paper and disinfecting hand wipes, how are they supposed to pay for all these gun-related costs? By purchasing even fewer educational materials for the students? By raising property taxes, which can no longer be written off?
There are many reasons why I don't agree with this proposal and Dave hits on many of them. But simply as a practical matter, who is going to pay for it?
Wouldn't it be easier to made guns really really hard to get? Bullets too?
worst 'if you give a mouse a cookie' story ever.
in a sense this is a tale of the nicks . . . we sort of thought we were basketball players, just as most of us probably think we can mow down people with a machine gun. i've seen bruce willis do it, so why can't i?
Post a Comment