Animals and Humans and Guns
When I was a small boy, some well meaning adult had read me scary stories about mythical Grimm-style fairy tales combined with my Church's tales of the devil and demons trying to lead me astray! Even though most of these stories had relatively happy endings, they got me thinking about the creatures that probably also inhabited my room at night when the lights were out, and it took several years with a night light and a lot of sleep overs with my aunts and Mom to convince me my monsters were under control!
If I was in the first grade, and learned of the Newtown shootings, just as with my night light, It would be around the 3rd or 4th grade before they could get me back in school without fearing for my life before bothering with learning! How could anybody convince me it was safe?
About the first grade level in my life, I found a baby raccoon whose mother had been killed and was promptly adopted by me, and bottle fed to keep it alive and well. We kept it in our milk cooler room, which allowed him access outside The raccoon was smart and quite like a monkey as far as learning things, it made a great pet except for a few bad habits that led to his downfall like no matter how well I fed him he could not resist stealing my Dad's corn!
My son and his family had tried to raise chickens for eggs several times in northern Wyoming, which worked well for a short period. A single raccoon got into the hen house both times and killed every single chicken. Not for food, just for sheer meanness! After taking some precautions with fencing and watching, this happened again. The raccoon would not eat the chickens, but just cut the chicken's head off. My son was following current NRA guidelines and was watching the chicken coops with his rifle but the raccoon still got the chickens!
The NRA proposes a 'solution' to multitude of shootings problem and announced it will fund a team that will design a program to get armed security personnel on school grounds across the country. Basically, requiring the NRA gun manufacturing masters to make more guns! To get to the details, would we need a armed security personnel for each class room? Would they need to wear body armor as do most of the attackers?
Wait a minute, there was a guard at Columbine http://www.slate.com/... still, a lot of people got killed. That didn't work so well.
I think we need to spend more time in figuring out why a gentle pet like my pet raccoon above can turn into a killing machine that wipes out a entire hen house. How does someone get so warped they want to kill themselves and take 26 people with them?
It seems like closing the loop on background checks and assault rifle and high-round clips bans would be a start. How about a large tax on guns and ammunition to pay for some of the costs of these massacres?
In any case, I do not think an armed guard would have made me sleep any better when I was in the first grade with my night light as I am sure it will not help most first graders today trying to cope with the disaster in Newtown. I had visited South Africa in the 80's when they were in a war with Angola. There were armed guards everywhere, shopping malls, Restaurants, etc. Is this our countries future? I hope not!
I believe what the NRA is suggesting is about as absurd as figuring out some way to arm chickens to defend themselves against raccoons! Good luck with that!