Arming teachers for safety likely to create gang that can’t shoot straight

By David McElroy · May 2, 2013

As 15 teachers sat in a meeting last Friday at their school in Halfway, Ore., two gunmen suddenly burst into the room with handguns. The assailants wore hoodies to hide their faces, and they immediately started firing. Within moments, almost every teacher was dead — or would have been if it hadn’t been a drill.

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to scare these teachers by making them believe they were being killed, but some of them claim that it was an effective teaching tool. What’s interesting, though, is that these teachers had already received training from the local sheriff’s department about how they could react in the even of an active shooter.

It apparently made no difference when they weren’t expecting an attack. For me, this brings to mind several points.

First, these are teachers, not a team of armed security guards. Just as those on the progressive left are completely unrealistic about the effects of taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, those on the conservative right are just as unrealistic about the effectiveness of arming teachers. I’m sure there are the occasional teachers who would be effective in a firefight, but I’d say they are few and far between. Trying to turn them into security guards isn’t going to work. It’s not their job and they’re probably going to panic if a real shooter shows up. That’s Halfway teacher Dollie Beck in the picture above. Does she look like someone you’d hire as a security guard?

Second, there’s a tremendous amount of effort to prepare for something that will almost never happen to any of these teachers or students. I’ve talked about relative risk before, but most people just aren’t interested in the numbers, because they have emotional reactions instead. This kind of armed attack on a school is very rare. A child is far more likely to be hurt or killed in a car on the way to school — or even in the bathtub at home — than he is to ever face an attack in his school.

Third, what kind of insane police and school officials send apparent attackers into a school to make teachers believe they’re being shot? They’re lucky that nobody got hurt. They’re also lucky that none of the teachers happened to have a weapon of any kind. Some other schools have gone even further, simulating live attacks with students. For instance, a school in El Paso had such a fake “raid” last year. Children were frantically texting their parents that there was yelling and shooting all around them. Is this helping anyone?

There’s a lot of paranoia about school safety right now, but it’s mostly wasted effort and needless fear. There are a lot of very reasonable things to be concerned about happening in life — because they have a decent probability of happening — but crazed school shooters aren’t among them. And the more we keep talking about it, the more likely the copycats are to try.

I’d say these teachers were far more terrorized by their own local school and police officials than they’re ever going to be by a school shooter. We need to get some perspective about this issue, but that’s not likely to happen.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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