During the meeting with Parkland students at the White House on Wednesday President Trump said arming teachers is a step that can be taken to make schools less-attractive targets for attackers.
He said that as things stand, attackers have nothing to lose because no one can shoot back.
Is President Trump right that teachers in public schools should be armed? Absolutely. Is the idea crazy? No. The situation in government-run public schools is crazy. And we should be asking why.
In more reasonable times, the answer would be obvious. Public schools are government-run behemoths. They’re required to be all things to all people. It’s virtually impossible to expel a student from a public school. Particularly at the high school level, government-run schools are a way for the federal and state governments to exert control over the population of young people soon to be citizens. If education were really the goal of such schools, it would be easy to expel unmotivated or otherwise undesirable students.
That’s what private schools do, because the purpose of private schools is strictly education. “If you don’t want to learn, you don’t belong here,” is the spoken and unspoken premise. But at government-run schools, the primary purpose is not education. It’s indoctrination into the citizenry, as the government defines it.
When you compel young adults to do the government’s bidding — whether it’s to learn algebra, or pay homage to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — especially in an otherwise largely free society such as ours, it’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a wonder we don’t have more school shootings than we do. It only takes a tiny minority of the most resentful and offended students to vent their rage in this way. If they had never been part of the educational system they so resent in the first place, schools would not be at risk. Sure, they’d likely be criminals out in society, but at least schools would be safe. That’s why you’re not finding these tragedies at private schools — only at government-run schools.
The establishment media and politicians who mock President Trump’s proposal are truly insane. Only they don’t know it. They live in an insular world protected from the consequences of their own assumptions and claimed values. The most blatant example is that the elite officials in government who demand government schools ALWAYS send their own children to private schools. What could be more self-refuting — and revealing — than that?
They mock the idea of arming teachers while getting away with never having to explain why their government-run institutions are places where so many kids wish to open fire in the first place.
If President Trump does what Republican presidents always have done in the past, and backtracks on gun control in order to appease his utterly unappeasable, totalitarian opponents, then the rest of us had better brace ourselves for a very rough ride — beyond the classroom. Gun sales should be going up, and people who value their Second Amendment rights should never become complacent, even though Donald Trump happens to be in the White House at the moment.
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