Betsy DeVos is good with that. And she must be correct because she's the United States Secretary of Education. And we're absolutely certain because she's held that job for her entire professional career.
Now sure, a lot of you cynics will say, "Yeah but she's 82 years old and she's never had a job until last year." Of course that's true, but it doesn't negate the contention that 100% of her job experience is as Secretary of Education.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's look at the issue itself. Should teachers have guns in school? I think they'd be helpful, for example, during grievance hearings. When teachers are called into the principal's office for things that happened two years ago, you can always tell the principal that the contract says letters in file have to be about things that happened less than three months ago. But then he'll call legal and they'll say do any damn thing you feel like.
At times like those, a gun might buttress your already righteous argument. Also, at outside grievance hearings, when you look into the soulless dead eyes of the DOE hacks who are going to deny you no matter what, it might be a good idea to have something to wake them. I think if you pulled your sawed off shotgun from your London Fog it would make them think twice. Maybe it would stir them into actually listening to what you were saying. You never know. And then there are contract negotiations. But I digress.
The classroom is a funny place already. Just yesterday I told a boy to move his seat. He was already mad at me for the last time I did that. He was sitting with two others, both Spanish speakers like him, and they were having a grand old time. When I prevailed on him to move, he announced, "Quiero un abogado." He wanted a lawyer. Today, after changing a few other seats, I tried to move him to a place where he'd have more interaction again. He was having none of it and sat at a table by himself.
That wasn't a really terrible thing, but you bring guns into the equation, and if either he or I were crazy enough, it might have become a truly notable situation. Sometimes you want things to be as simple as you can possibly make them. In fact, I frequently want things as simple as I can make them. Guns, as far as I can see, don't make things simple at all.
All that crap about how a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun is nonsense. There have been armed officers on the premises of school shootings, and the shootings went on anyway. Unless said good guy is in exact proximity and gets his gun out first, there's little possibility that will work well at all. And unless he has perfect aim, who knows who he's gonna shoot? Realistically, I don't want to carry a gun in school. I trust a whole lot of my colleagues, many absolutely, but I wouldn't want them carrying around guns either.
I'm sure the octogenarians in the Senate think we just sit around with big wooden pointers and expound our wisdom to wholly cooperative students. Then they put apples on our desks and tell us what a great job we do. Actually there's tremendous stress in this job and I frequently see people at their last nerve. I'm fond of a whole lot of these people, but nonetheless I'd be just as happy if they didn't have guns either.
Here's what this is really about--the NRA and the politicians crawling out of its pockets wish to make it appear they're doing something about the atrocities they condone time after time. Perish forbid we should create laws that would effectively halt the sale and spread of assault rifles used to kill our children. That would supposedly violate their second amendment rights and worse, it would cut into the profits of the gun industry. That's who the NRA really represents and cares about.
Despite their protestations about being broke, the NRA is poised to spend one million dollars on ads to support Trump's SCOTUS pick, Rapey Judge Biff. Clearly Biff is in the bag for not only keeping Trump out of the pokey, but also the slugs who shill for the gun industry.
Don't forget to vote.
Carrots
38 minutes ago