I know I’m not the only one thinking about this. I keep trying to imagine Miss Murphy, my first grade teacher, shooting it out with a mass murderer armed with a military assault rifle spraying the hallways with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Make Miss Murphy’s day. It just doesn’t track. It’s absolutely insane. Of all the nonsensical proposals to try to stop the regular school shootings that keep repeating themselves over and over in America, arming teachers with deadly weapons is undoubtedly the dumbest idea. A teacher’s job is to teach students, not shoot them.
It’s no surprise the dumbest possible idea has been seized upon as the perfect solution to school shootings by Donald Trump—a president always searching for simple-minded answers to complicated problems, preferably those that can be illustrated with cartoons so he won’t have to read anything. If you want serious, intelligent proposals on what to do to protect school children from mass shootings, you have to listen to the students who survived the St. Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Nothing concentrates the mind like hiding in a classroom closet listening to the screams of your dying friends and teachers being slaughtered in the hallways. The kids focused immediately on the real source of the problem: a deadly weapon designed for soldiers to kill as many human beings as possible on an enemy battlefield that had no place in their school building or in their community.
The Kids Demand Action on Guns
Those high school kids were so bright, articulate and media savvy that, within days, they were dominating TV demanding that adult politicians actually do something to keep weapons of mass murder out of the hands of the likes of an expelled, 19-year-old student who legally bought an AR-15 military assault rifle to kill 14 classmates and three teachers in their school.
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The Parkland kids, idealistic enough to believe adult politicians should protect their communities, called for outlawing military assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines and demanded their elected officials stop accepting blood money from the NRA (National Rifle Association). They’re now organizing high school students nationally for a march on Washington, D.C., to be held on Saturday, March 24, and local demonstrations on that day around the country. It’s a brand-new political force in the fight for intelligent gun laws.
In the past, victims of school shootings often were either too young or too dead to stand up to the NRA, which funds politicians who are more worried about protecting the gun lobby from laws restricting gun sales than protecting school children from being ripped apart by military assault rifles. The NRA used to buy itself friendly politicians in both political parties. But when President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden led a Democratic movement for common sense gun regulations after the Newtown, Conn., slaughter of 20 beautiful 6 and 7 year olds, it was Republicans who joyfully kept raking in large NRA political contributions for opposing sensible gun laws.
People forget that the real foot soldiers in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s were children. In Milwaukee, Alderwoman Vel Phillips repeatedly introduced laws against housing discrimination, and Father James Groppi led marches in support of those open housing laws. But, just as in other civil rights demonstrations around the country, the marches, led by the NAACP Youth Council, were often made up of school children—black and white. The idealistic passion of young people and their basic sense of right and wrong led them to successfully challenge what their beaten-down parents had long accepted as an unchanging, racist status quo.
Ending Access to Deadly Weapons
Today, that perfectly describes the futility many adults feel about U.S. politicians ever doing anything to end ready access to deadly weapons no matter how many bodies pile up in schools and other public places. Why should the reaction to just another horrific school shooting be any different?
Republicans (including Trump) immediately tried to shift the conversation away from guns to mental health. That shouldn’t really help Republicans whose consistent priorities include increasing access to guns and reducing the availability of health care.
The great thing about young people getting involved in America’s gun debate is, in the words of songwriter Peter Case, they are “too young not to understand” when they’re being fed a line of unadulterated cow flop. Trump and some Republicans are now pretending to consider an almost infinitesimal break with the NRA threatening to possibly, maybe— wow, get this—raise the age to purchase military assault weapons all the way from 18 to 21.
The simple truth is that military assault weapons have absolutely no legitimate use in civilian society at any age for either hunting or self-defense. There’s no season to bag large numbers of humans, and no one in America has any rational fear of being attacked by an army. As the kids shouted in unison at a recent rally: “We call B.S.!”
