National Rednecks

NRA tactics have reached a new low with a TV ad claiming that Barack Obama, whose children are protected by the Secret Service, is not concerned with the safety of other schoolchildren. The ad is based on his refusal, at least until now, to advocate placing an armed policeman in all our public schools, a suggestion made by Wayne LaPierre, grand mufti of the organization.

The merits of this claim are without empirical evidence. Virginia Tech, the scene of our largest mass shooting to date, had its own police force at the time. Granted, this by itself doesn’t disprove the idea. But the fact that the one room schoolhouse has become a piece of folklore is a convincing, if not overwhelming, argument to the contrary. Our most recent mass murderer had clearly given forethought to his actions and would have been unlikely to pick a classroom that happened to be occupied by a campus policeman with the intuition to know where trouble would occur.

Then we have the suggestion of arming teachers, presumably with handguns. Rifles are hard to conceal and so cumbersome to pick up and aim at a culprit already holding an assault weapon pointed in one’s direction. Every picture I’ve seen of people firing pistols, other than John Wayne types in movies, showed them using both hands. But most important, pistols are notoriously inaccurate, even in the hands of expert marksmen like our teachers, and just might hit students in the general vicinity of the intended target.

I believe that with the tragedy at Sandy Hook School in Newtown the tide has turned and the gun fanatics will be on the defensive until further notice. The time it has taken for us to reach this point is not to our credit. The victims at Virginia Tech were young adults, not cute children, and I’m certain a similar event at an inner city school would not have aroused the public to this extent. Still it looks as if a majority of the nation has seen the light. I hope the bereaved relatives and friends of the victims will be able to find a bit of solace in the fact that the loss of these young lives may eventually save the lives of many more.