Dec 27 2012
∞
“ Where else does all this lead? Will we evaluate teachers not only on their students’ test scores, but on target practice, with merit pay for mastery of semi-automatic weapons? Mourners at the funeral of the next Vicki Soto shouldn’t have to whisper about her aim. Or is the only good teacher the teacher who keeps a Glock in her purse, and knows how to use it; or the one who has a second gun on her so that when some troubled eighth-grader grabs the classroom weapon she can shoot down her own student? Perhaps we’d be told then that he wouldn’t have done it if he knew that everyone else at recess had a gun. Do we picture our students becoming regimented gunmen themselves, or rather gun-children, with weaponry a normalized part of the high-school, then middle- and elementary-school curriculum—child soldiers for the Second Amendment? This is where gun advocacy ends: not with a right to bear arms, but with an insistence that the rest of us have an obligation to do so. In the name of a misreading of the Second Amendment, teachers and children are conscripted in a gunfight. A movement that frames its cause as liberty imposes fear, and service only to the gun.
