The Thinking Trick is also useful in situations that involve, not lost objects, but lost reason. For instance, former president, Donald Trump spent a long time at the NRA Convention last weekend in Indianapolis airing the notion that a good way to stop school shootings is by arming teachers.
“They’d go for special training and they would be there and you would no longer have a gun-free zone,” the former president said. “Gun-free zone to a maniac, because they’re all cowards, a gun-free zone is: ‘Let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us’.”
So school shooting are the schools’ fault? For inviting shooters in, by not having a gun in every teacher’s drawer? O....kay.
Trump went on, crediting guns in airplane cockpits as the reason hijackings faded away (me, I would suspect that the full body security scans of passengers to make sure they aren’t armed with so much as a nail clipper might have had something to do with it. Using his school logic, disarming airline passengers is just asking for trouble).
But that’s the problem with thinking, as attempted by some. They keep tripping over their unexamined assumptions, like the former president’s theory that kids who shoot up schools first rationally weigh their options.
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I would expect that a few teachers would leave their guns unprotected & some angry student would take it & start shooting. That's inevitable, based on what's happened with cops forgetting their guns, like the female Secret Service agent who forgot her gun in a public toilet.
ReplyDeleteAs for the current lack of airplane hijackings, not just the increased airport security, but the mandated locked & armored doors to the cockpits has done that. Plus now all commercial pilots know to never ever open the cockpit to a hijacker, no matter how many passengers & cabin crew are threatened, which is how 9/11 happened. Those terrorist managed to get some sort of knives on board, probably by taking those long blades from disposable utility knives mounted sideways in sides of their carry ons & then wrapped them in tape to use as weapons at the throats of the cabin crew.
I agree arming teachers is not a solution to the problem. Probably not even a part of the solution
ReplyDeleteWhat is the solution or part of the solution?
Yes, the somewhere around a thousand people who have been killed in schools in the last 5 years is only a small percentage of the number of people who've lost their lives to gun violence
But there's some 300 and some million who haven't lost their lives to the scourge
Maybe you could elaborate on that last thought, because you might be onto something. Let's concentrate on those who AREN'T killed by guns. I think you've hit on the solution.
DeleteI have a better idea. Let's concentrate on things NOT said by Drumpf.
DeleteUmm, Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana have all passed bills encouraging armed teachers. One's been introduced into the Illinois legislature. You're right, if this were just Trump, I wouldn't bother. It's not just Trump. Remember: he's a symptom, not a cause.
DeleteMaybe you, or anyone could come up with a solution to end gun violence.
DeleteWait ! What are those hundreds of millions of people, surrounded by guns, doing ?
Following the law.
Now how do we get the tiny percentage who use guns illegally to follow the law? Or the CJ system could do their job and imprison the scum. Before they repeat offend.
Or maybe you could read the column you're reacting to, for comprehension as they say in school.
DeleteIdaho arms teachers. I grew up there. Friends and acquaintances did not have great safety record with guns. One childhood friend I dated once took me shooting before the movie, (no dinner!). When I refused to shoot, he said he just loved the feel of power a gun gave him. A few years later he killed himself with it.
ReplyDeleteAll this talk about arming teachers...bah, humbug. Why do we need teachers at all? Or schools? No schools, no school shootings. Let's dispense with public education, and let parents home-school their offspring.That usually works out quite well. If puppies and kittens can learn to function that way, why not human children? Are dogs and cats smarter than we are?
ReplyDeleteAnd just to make each home-school environment even safer, require all those parent-teachers to be armed. If Johnny and Susie act up or don't do their homework...BANG. Problem solved. Gotta problem? Just shoot at it...or throw money at it. It's the American way.
Arming teachers is a terrible idea. I know this because I was an armed teacher. I was faculty at a college down the road an hour from another college where 9 were killed in a mass shooting (Umpqua Oregon community college , 2017). Not only did we have frequent bomb threats, I personally received a hand-written death threat (someone wanted to kill Jews). I also had a gun pointed at my head by a disturbed person. (Turned out not loaded.)
ReplyDeleteGrowing up gun-adverse in a liberal family in Chicago, finding myself living on property bordering national forest, with cougar and bears frequently visiting my yard, camping in the wilderness, and my kid’s school-mates inviting him to go hunting (yes, these families rely on hunting for good, healthy, organic meat), I decided I better get myself and my kid fire-arm knowledge. I became fairly competent. BTW, not one of my neighbors - hunters, farmers, hikers, wilderness campers, Republicans - ever have any kind of AK automatic weapon, except the young man who pointed a gun to my head because he had a bruised ego that was threatened by a small woman setting boundaries. (His father later told me he had been bullied and these military weapons made him feel powerful. Oh, and he grew up constantly playing violent video games)
After the shooting up the road, and multiple threats, some of my colleagues and I brought concealed guns to work (against the rules). I asked my firearms instructor (a retired police officer) what he thought. He said: “You prepare a lesson, you go to class, that is your focus. Someone comes in with a focus to shoot. There is little chance that you can change your focus that quickly to match theirs, even if you are a great shot. Law enforcement are trained to have that focus constantly, you aren’t. You’ll probably miss your target and take out an innocent. And you’ll just be dead”.
I did the only sane thing. I retired.
Those last few sentences really show what a bizarro world the gun fetishists inhabit. Suggesting that arming teachers would lead to more people being killed -- practically indisputable -- makes one a "sissy." As does believing that guns should be subject to strict regulations, just as a "5,000 hunk of metal" being driven to work is. Meanwhile, the guy in the photo at the top of this post, who needs to strap a rifle to his shoulder in order to feel comfortable talking to an actual baby is supposed to be some kind of tough guy. Right!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I took that out — I hadn't read his remarks to the end, and they started out sane, and then veered into nutsiworld. You can't point out to a man that his masculinity seems tied up in his arsenal — it doesn't work, because if he were in the habit of processing relevant information, he wouldn't be the way he is.
DeleteIndeed. I was very surprised to see that that comment had seen the light of day and pretty much expected that both it and my reply would soon be axed.
Delete