| You want to know why our cultural sense of guns is what it is? In response to yesterday's self-serving and stupid suggestion from NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre that we put armed guards in every school in the country (at a cost of at least $5.5 billion), Julie Mack of the Kalamazoo Gazette treats it like it's a real idea. When I talk to local educators about the issues of guns in schools, one of the first concerns is pragmatic: How would that work, exactly? How would it help? What is the likelihood of unintended consequences, such as a student getting ahold of a weapon? That's why there's such skepticism -- locally and nationally -- with the National Rifle Association's proposal to put armed guards in every school.
Skepticism is to put it mildly. But, this is how to sum things up: A week after a horrible school massacre, the NRA comes out of hiding and its public face blames the violence on really old videogames (two of which don't involve guns) and really old movies (Natural Born Killers and American Psycho), and suggests that the solution is to put armed "volunteers" in our schools at an expense to be paid for by the public, and instead of dismissing the idea scornfully as a brazenly opportunistic, impractical and counterproductive, our media instead sets out to explore it. There are some ideas that are so incredibly stupid that they can be dismissed out of hand. This was one. When it gets treated otherwise, it gets the sheen of semi-respectability, which means it winds up being taken seriously. |
