The recent rampage in Newport, Connecticut has the entire country talking about gun rights, safety, and the protection of young, innocent schoolchildren. Fixing the woeful measures of school protection, is a commonly held belief, across politics of all stripes. How best to protect those schoolchildren, however, has any number of suggestions, and just as many critics.
Many centrists and most Republicans support the placing of armed police, either active or retired, in schools. The reasoning goes, as police, they have received plenty of training, both with firearms, and with person-to-person interactions. Met with a threat, police’s first instinct is surely not carelessly to open fire – that is the last option, when talking and negotiating have proven ineffective. Trained to use words first, and lethal force last, is how the police operate.
While thinking about that, and attempting to find problems and flaws with police in schools, I may have inadvertently found a reason why some progressives do not want cops in schools. Much progressive rhetoric relies on the belief that authority is inherently bad, and it should always be questioned, and sometimes engaged physically.
I think here lies the crux of their problem with police in schools. How on earth could police officers who provide safe learning environments be a bad thing? While there are some progressives who actually fear the inanimate object that is a firearm, seeing a mature, responsible authority figure at school with that firearm, would tear down tenets of the progressive orthodoxy.
Students would see and interact with a policeman everyday, learning that police are not the overbearing monsters that many on the left would have the public believe. Add to that the effect of a sidearm tucked safely away in a holster, and the child learns that the gun is not the randomly-firing, crazy-tool-with-a-mind of its own, either. Opposing police in schools also creates a problem with many progressives’ claim that only highly-trained, responsible, licensed people should be allowed to have firearms at all.
If you allow children to see this same responsibility daily, and the children also grow to respect the policemen as more than just an authority (as someone who has sworn to place his own life in between the children’s’ lives and any threat) and you would cause all sorts of short-circuiting with liberal narratives. The schoolchildren will experience cognitive dissonance between the media who love to show the most atrocious police stories possible, and the friendly school protector. The children will also be able to ask the policeman questions and learn from him.
Once that sort of erosion of progressive dogma starts – where would it end? The progressives, already outnumbered, might be forced to defend more of their often illogical and baseless claims, in futile attempt to remain relevant. Why it could be the end of the entire progressive false reality. To me, the positives far outweigh the imagined negatives, and the course is clear – show the children we care enough to protect them from both evil threats, and the misguided progressive claim that guns are inherently evil, and that people should not be able to protect themselves.
The Conservative Citizen 
I am certain that those one the left do, in fact, want safe schools. To paint them as otherwise paints them similar to the shooters in that they want the same outcome but with different motivations. That portrait, I think is a bit harsh. It is my believe that in this area we all want the same thing which makes it imperative to drop the demagoguery and come to the table with well reasoned and rational minds to minimize the danger. The only way this sort of thing will be absolutely prevented is if we choose to eliminate people from the planet and as a person, I find that outcome unworkable.
Rick, The leftist perception of safety has been warped by progressive ideology. They view any form of moral authority (religion, police, parental authority) to be evil. Yet they view governmental authority as the great equalizer. Because of this they are incapable of comprehending and accepting human nature and the common sense of having armed guards in schools. They will fight against it because the feel that it is the imposition of moral absolutes that creates an unsafe environment. Not because the want to see anyone physically harmed.
I will cede that most on the left think that all of our problems would be solved were we to give up any and all differences among us and work to be equal in every way – that is except for those who would lead the Utopian commune which may not approximate the kind of living described in Kurt Vonnegut’s, “Harrison Bergeron”, but something close. After all who would oversee that those with intellectual, physical, or aesthetic advantages do not make those without them feel bad – a sort of Handicapper General; but perhaps one less public in their adjudications <- link to the full movie 2081, the story of Harrison Bergeron for those who haven't read the short story..
Agreed. The fact that gun control has taken center stage again in Sandy Hook and again in the killings of two firefighters and the wounding of two others and a police officer is an example of willful blindness to the facts. One fact is that both subjects had a history of mental illness. The Sandy Hook shooter was being evaluated and apparently reacted to the prospect of being involuntarily committed by his mother in a plea that he was a danger to himself and others. He had been seeing a psychiatrist and a family doctor for his Asperger's disease. What was their role in this failure to identify a potential killer?
In the second case, the killer already had a record of murdering his own grandmother with a hammer. Yet, at the end of a 17 year sentence he was somehow deemed fit for release from prison without mandated psychiatric follow-up. And how did he manage to acquire [illegally] and keep weapons in his possession without discovery by his parole officer? Where was the failure here? According to the left – it was the fault of the weapons used – not the user or the system who freed him whimsically and capriciously without a proper plan for constant monitoring and mental assessments.
Now, there is this push for examining the Sandy Hook shooter's DNA for an "Evil Gene" that spawns monsters and killers. The left's fear is that if such a gene is identified, people with a variant or some small part of that gene's makeup will be pulled off the streets and locked up because of the possibility that the portion they have may be the actually trigger or some other such nonsense. This is just another way of saying the the killer is a victim and that punishment should be as benevolent and short-termed as possible. They completely dismiss the possibility that if the psychiatric community ever gets its act together and performs at least as well as a profession of physicians as the "scientists" who predict the weather in terms of consistency and accuracy in diagnostic and prognostic outcomes.
Notice how the MSM emphasizes the use of a "Bushmaster" semi-automatic in the two cases and downplays or omits the failure of the judiciary and the criminal justice system. Ignores the failure to properly evaluate a murderer's state of mind prior to sentencing which sets the stage for a reckless minimally supervised release. They are released under the most inane and ineffective terms to be overseen by lay persons with no psychiatric training to write the periodic evaluations – supposing such behavioral and conduct evaluations are required.
It's cheaper and politically more effective to suffer the periodic mass killings to save money and to give rise to a false need to blame guns instead of shooters for the calamity in order to so dilute the 2nd Amendment that is eventually becomes meaningless. It is the liberal psychiatric associations who have let America down with their nebulous pronouncements and predictions in a vacuum based upon one or two visits pre-trial with no investment in follow-up with those who will be eligible for parole. It is the liberal psychiatric associations that make efforts to involuntarily commit persons who pose a threat or to hold them until assurances are great that their patients who need meds to conform are willing to take them and who understand the consequences of not doing so – i.e. re-commitment until taking the meds become so ingrained that the chance of harm to others is deemed to be remote.
A view into punishing cavalier psychiatrists through malpractice prosecutions of lawsuits also needs to be looked at. The truth of the matter is that the left only believes in beginnings and ends and has no regard for the means connecting the two or the immoral lack of ethics, law and philosophy used to arrive at those means.
Our culture has become too comfortable with violence from a myriad of sources to the point that it only becomes noticed when incidents such as these two occur, or others like the Aurora movie theater killings, the massacres at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School….
Many people are beginning to think that if the government and the medical profession can't identify and control people suffering from a mental illness or a severe personality disorder, then I need to protect myself. Those people are flocking to gun stores after each incident to buy all sorts of weapons – some with training, but most without. This is the opposite reaction that the left would like to see; but anyone with common sense would call it predictable. Of all the things in society and the law that need fixing, more gun control will prove to be the least effective. Until a solution can be worked out, the best way to limit killings is by having enough armed people in locations where killers roam looking for unexpectent targets.
While reading this, a couple incidents from memory surfaced. I used to work in a university library with really good av meeting facilities and we hosted a class once for police artists to learn to use a specific software. As they are supposed to, the police came to class with their service revolvers holstered, walking through the lobby and a number of the tenured researchers came over to the check out desk and said, “Are they wearing guns here?” rather incredulously. It just so happened that earlier in life I had worked at the local pool where we always had police around. Off shift officers took turns just being there, and at closing we always had at least a couple squad cars. I knew these guys at the time, and happened to know that even off duty, cops have to have their weapons on them. One good friend couldn’t go to the grocery store without having to help out with shoplifting cases while he was off-duty. Anyway, this didn’t sit well with the professor types and that was the last time that group was hosted.
I also knew a girl who was dating a cop and it didn’t sit well with her that he carried his weapon. She’s a nurse and works in a hospital which is a no-gun zone. There’s other leftist influences with her that were pretty disturbing on a number of levels.
I do think there is some validity to what your post indicates – the left wants little islands of some sort of comfort zone. Seeing a weapon takes them out of their comfort zone, and I do think that they’ve been conditioned to think that way, and they are conditioning the school kids in the same manner.
I’m hearing about this phenomena more and more these days – I have a friend who refers to it as the left teaching “learned helplessness”. It’s very tragically a growing problem too.
Reblogged this on News You May Have Missed and commented:
Why The Left Doesn’t Want Safe Schools
Reblogged this on Observations and Opinions of a Middle Aged Housewife and commented:
Once again, common sense is not so common.
The article that you wrote has many good points. I taught math for one year in a public school in Phoenix. However, there is another reason that is even more important as to why the liberals do want police in the schools. The reason that they do want police in the schools is that minorities committ a huge number of crimes that would have to be documented and reported and many of these so-called minority youth would end up being prosecuted and imprisoned. There are a huge amount of felonies committ in public schools that are mislabeled or brushed aside.