Former and current useless member of society Newt Gingrich was on Fox & Friends this morning. Fox & Friends is the show where morality goes to die—before lunch time! Discussing what can be done in the wake of the mass shooting deaths in Parkland, Florida, the former “big idea” man for the Republican Party gave his new “big idea” to protect our country’s children: more guns in schools.
I think, depending on the size of the school, there should be six to eight teachers and administrators who are trained in the use of firearms and have concealed and carry permits, and are prepared to defend the kids.
Gingrich goes on to say that since we will never be able to get rid of enough guns in our country, there are always going to be people running into schools ready to murder as many people as possible. He has a point. While we are the only country—first, second, third, or fourth-world country for that matter—that faces this level of gun violence, the issue isn’t the fact that we have too many guns and too many powerful guns, we just haven’t gotten them into the dexterous hands of the underpaid and undervalued teachers. Conservatives have been peddling this militarization of our educational systems for a while now. Utah decided to allow concealed carry a couple of years ago for some teachers, leading to teachers shooting themselves “on accident.”
Although no other faculty or students witnessed the shooting, they might have heard the gunshot or seen the teacher as she was taken out of the school to the hospital, Horsley said.
Crisis counselors were available and a substitute was brought in for the teacher's class, though Horsley declined to say which grade she teaches.
I’m surprised that Newt didn’t suggest that instead of educators needing a master’s degree in education, they should simply be military veterans. Forget reading, writing, and arithmetic—we should just have trained marksmen teaching our kids how to use their guns for when the “bad people” with guns come into their schools. This is an interesting idea for a serial adulterer that married his high school math teacher and then, once he started sleeping with a new woman, gave her divorce papers while she was in the hospital getting surgery for cancer. I wonder what might have happened if she was “carrying” back then?
To put this into perspective, here’s a study on New York Police and their performance during gunfights.
As has been reported nationally, police officers often miss their targets (Morrison, 2006, p. 332). The NYPD reports hit-rate statistics both for officers involved in a gunfight and for officers who shoot at subjects who do not return fire. Between 1998 and 2006, the average hit rate was 18 percent for gunfights. Between 1998 and 2006, the average hit rate in situations in which fire was not returned was 30 percent. In 2006, the hit rate against subjects who did not return fire was 27 percent.
When bullets don’t hit the thing you are shooting at, they don’t disappear, they hit other things. So, even if you put trained police officers into the classrooms you are looking at a “hit rate” of less than a third—when no one is shooting back at them.
Conservatives, not unlike fascists, have been promoting the need to turn our educational system into something resembling a Spartan prison setting. Rush Limbaugh has chimed in recently with the same “big idea.” Newt Gingrich, like Paul Ryan and whomever else people want to pretend are the “smart” folks in the Republican Party, have one thing in common: bad ideas.