It seems like every story that involves a gun being fired in a school becomes national news. School safety is a concern for millions of Americans, and not entirely without reason. Our children are vulnerable, and we’d rather they be safe and sound, especially at a place they’re required to be for a good chunk of the year.
But there’s also something of a double standard, which was pointed out by my friend Rob Morse.
What should we do to protect our schools? We hear a flurry of sound bites from both sides of this debate.
Each side focuses on the narrow point that makes their case in the fewest words. There are good arguments that say fewer good people get shot once a good guy or gal is shooting at the murderer.
Another point of view says that it is better if the murderer never comes to your school or college in the first place.
Unfortunately, that argument takes some serious twists and turns. Both arguments are right as they offer answers to different questions. What we should do depends entirely on who we want to help. Do we want to make students safer or do we want to feel better and turn away from the uncomfortable problem?
What they say isn’t what they do.
The debate about mass public violence doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Our elites solved this problem on their own. Celebrities have personal security for many reasons. Some people might hate what the celebrity said. Some might hate that the businessman is wealthy. Some people want to hurt a famous person simply to become notorious. For those reasons and more, rich people are targets. Our political elites and rich families live in walled compounds. They have chauffeurs and private jets. They have armed security for themselves and their family. The elites may say that ordinary people shouldn’t have guns, but what they do is something different. They go armed or buy their own protection.
He points out that the rest of us don’t have those options. We have to live our lives, and that means a certain degree of risk that these folks simply don’t have to deal with. They can outsource their personal protection, while most of us can’t.
When it comes to schools, they can also send their kids to expensive private schools with massive security teams, while most of us are forced to deal with public schools where, if we’re lucky, there’s a dedicated school resource officer who might get there in time to protect our precious babies.
Now, I don’t begrudge the elite their perks. If you earn your place in the top one percent, you deserve to enjoy it. I’d love to have a full security team looking after my family 24/7, so I can’t take issue with people who have the means to do so doing the same thing I’d do in their place.
What bothers me is how many of them want to begrudge me taking what steps are available to me to do the same, or for wanting at least something better than the status quo to protect my own children.
I don’t expect teachers to be selfless martyrs who die shooting back at a would-be killer just to keep my child alive (hypothetically, anyway. I homeschool, so it’s different) or anything like that. I want them to have guns so they can protect themselves and, by extension, protect the kids. I’m at least realistic about what it is I’m talking about.
And I don’t pretend my kids are more worthy of safety than anyone else’s, either.
Read the full article here
