The Parkland commission studied the aftermath of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and voted 13-1 to recommend arming teachers and administrators. Esquire’s Jack Holmes thinks that will only lead to chaos and fear.
Your child should have to pass through numerous highly secure checkpoints to get to algebra class. They should be aware, constantly, that they are at risk of horrific injury or death while studying. There is no room, anymore, for schools to be a calm and nurturing environment that helps children grow into the greatest version of themselves. This is about survival, and the only solution is more guns. Sure, other countries have mentally ill people and a tiny fraction of the gun deaths. But they aren’t free. Freedom is having 57 times as many school shootings.
So kids should know that, if all else fails, there’s something to fall back on. At all times—every second of every day—there is a deadly weapon in their teacher’s desk. The teacher should have to pass a background check (not a requirement for all gun sales) and undergo strict training (almost never a requirement for civilians to own a gun).
– Jack Holmes for Esquire, Fox News and the NRA’s Vision for American Schools is Guns and Fear
Marxist anti-personal defense fear mongering at its best.
No, there is nothing Marxist, or any of the other diseased thinking of the former USSR, in what he is saying. He is merely an idiot in what he says, not a Marxist.
These people have an agenda.
IF simple personal stupidity on their part is what you believe, than you are the idiot.
It is foolish hyperbole, a politician’s trick, to use a really evil term that does not fit. Also often used by snowflakes. All the times somebody calls something “Nazi” or “like the Nazi’s”, that sort of thing. It is nonsense, displays zero comprehension of what these evil things were.
These days “Socialism” and related terms are constantly misused far from their real meanings. Bernie Sanders is not a Socialist, tho he foolishly uses the term. He is more Libertarian with a hefty does of the safety net legislation popular in some European countries.
None of which embraces what Karl Marx proposed in his utopian nightmare.
Yes, anti-gunners have an agenda, of course they do. None of which involves creating a state based upon the twisted thinking of Karl Marx, Lenin, etc. Their agenda is based upon the foolish notion that guns cause behavior. They seek to alter bad human behavior by removing what they see as the cause.
Severely stupid on their part, but that is what they think. If they also have an agenda for safety net legislation, that is again nothing of Marxism.
Anti-gun people are not the only ones with an agenda, we pro-gun people have agendas too. My own is repeal of gun laws infringing on what honest people do back to the NFA 1934. That’s at the Federal level, if I lived in a state with infringing laws, I’d list those too.
Such as for folks in NY, a pro-gun agenda would be what? Repeal back to the Sullivan Law of 1911?
Yes, there is everything Marxist and positively Stalinist in what he says. The USSR was equally opposed to the right to keep and bear arms, and used brutal state force to keep their subjects — not citizens — effectively disarmed.
Bernout is a socialist and is not a Libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, even one apparently so colorful as yours. Anyone who actually knows the meaning of either term can reaily tell you how diametrically opposed those two ideologies truly are. Bernout even honeymooned in Moscow and fawned over bread lines. Yes, gun-grabbers have an agenda, and it is absolutely grounded quite firmly in the Marxist’s fevered desire to use the state to bring about their dystopian dictatorship — which is always the inevitable result of their policies, by the way. Even if it wasn’t, which it undeniably is no matter what anybody else says to the contrary, the net effect is exatly the same, regardless. Sure, he’s an ignorant socialist (but I repeating myself), but a socialist nonetheless.
Contrast this with us nominally “pro-civil rights” folks, as we like to call ourselves, there is tangible diversity of thought as to what exactly that means. The Fudds generally want modern sporting rifles to be banned, but not all guns (yet). They seem to be under the mistaken impression that the Second Amendment is about hunting. Whatever. They’re not even remotely interesting in learning, either, as much as we’ve tried over the decades. On the other end of the “spectrum,” as it were, folks like myself want a full-on repeal of the NFA ’34, GCA ’68, and all other federal gun control statutes. Furthermore, I want an outright prohibition nationwide on all states, counties, and cities to even bring to their council floors a gun control bill or similar amendment to any other bill. Authors would be subject to immediate on-the-spot arrest on the charge of high treason, which upon conviction shall carry a sentence of not less than life in prison without the possibility of parole.
I’m talking decades in a supermax slammer. 23-hour-a-day lockdown. Period.
And that’s if the jury doesn’t push for the death penalty, which they would be allowed to do — and with an option for summary execution, right there on the courthouse steps in full view of the public if it so pleased them.
Excedrine,
No, there has never been a Marxist state. There have certainly been those that claimed it, but claiming a thing and being a thing is not the same. The former USSR and all its puppet states, Cuba and now Venezuela all devolved as all Marxist states inevitably do. This is the trap of Marx’s thinking, any government built upon his ideas always needs a dictator to keep it together. An amoral strongman, kept in power by secret police and brutal repression. Neither of which were Marxist concepts for Socialism or Communism. Both of which are violations of what Utopian thinkers had imagined.
Marx died long before the USSR or other self-proclaimed Marxist nations were born. Had he seen them he’d of been appalled. No one can say if the result of his philosophy always leading to ruin would have caused him to recant his positions, or come up some other other utopian nonsense.
Without exception all true Socialist and Communist governments must and shall devolve into brutal police states. It is the inevitable reality of a utopian faction claiming if we simply make everyone economically and politically equal life will be marvelous, having a head-on collision with a population that finds centralized control and universal ownership to be a crushing way for human beings to live.
Everyone that is a statist wants guns removed from the people and a monopoly of force in the hands of the government. They might not even know that is what they are advocating for when they worship the government and their enforcers.
Arming teachers didn’t lead to chaos and fear in Israeli schools, why would it in ours.
Hell, more than half-a-dozen states “allow” campus carry now, and not one sk00l has reported a problem because of it. Some of them have had the policy on the books for decades at this point.
Wonder what agenda is being pushed here?
The one where human behavior is believed to be influenced by the presence of inanimate objects. As if the human mind and character is lacking in free will, at least it is if they should see something that can control them.
Such as forks, knives and spoons are the cause of over eating.
Or driving way too fast because, well hell, the gas pedal made you do it. Wasn’t your choice.
A nice short easy to remember term for this kind of thinking: “Dumbassedness”.
It sounds like he wants fewer obstructions and resteictions for teachers who want to carry at school.
So if Jack thinks armed defense is the wrong approach I guess he was okay with the cowering outside approach?
Jack thinks that whatever he needs to say to advance the concept that Jack should be in charge and paid a whole lot, is a good thing for Jack to say. His evidence is that Jack thinks it would benefit him, everybody else should fall in line, because Jack. Even though Jack don’t know Jack.
That takes care of my daily ration of snark. What a jackass.
Ouch!
They should “stay in their own lane”.
Speaking of lanes and gun control paradises. Stay free Cali:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0DaeTQ8F-k
Grew up when fear of nukes and “Duck and cover” were the norm. Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and well remember the fear of nukes, but I cannot remember anything about “duck and cover”. I first heard about it in the 1990’s. never mentioned or practiced at my schools in southeast Texas. I did hear “you can kiss your ass goodbye” mentioned with nukes on occasion.
Texas kids probably aren’t worth much. I was a grade schooler in a suburb of DC in the 50s and 60s, and I was under many a desk pretending a nuclear weapon wouldn’t be able to hurt me there.
Now I think about it, I also consumed several different varieties of polio vaccines before a current friend was paralyzed by polio in west Texas mid-’60s. Texas kids just did not rate.
I remember that era too, and the “Duck and Cover” drills on what to do in case of an atomic bomb attack. If there was a bright flash, you were to duck and cover.
Our school would announce the drill. We would all stand up and walk into the hallway, get against the wall and curl into a ball with hands over our heads.
I got in trouble for telling everybody that if we saw the bright flash, we were all dead long before we even could reach the hallway.
Teacher said if the explosion was too close to get to the hallway to duck and cover, just duck and cover right next to your desk.
Yeah, that was funny.
For us “Duck and cover” was to get under our desks. Years later I was told that it was easier to use a seating chart to identify bodies that way. Who knows? I do remember the outside walls were all side by side windows. Flying glass shards, radiation, dead is dead. I was in grade school during the Cuban missile crisis, when he/they shot JFK, the crappy old days. Imagine where the human race would be if we didn’t spend all our budgets on defense.
We’d be conquered, at some point. All these wars and defense spending seem pointless now, but will be a big payoff one day when we make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. With our hyper spending on defense, given a few more thousand years, our weaponry will be formidable enough to fend off host of threats around the galaxy.
I wish it were not necessary to have spent all that money on defense. Don’t see that we had any choice though.
Upside is we’d all be bilingual! German and Japanese.
Silly LarryinTX….. Didn’t you know that WW2 and the Cold War were all America’s fault? Japanes and Nazi genocide and Comunist democide is a western capitalist myth perpetuated to enslave the masses. “Violent tyrannical expansionism” is just a buzzword we used to oppress the world proletariat. Finally, there is no such thing as “American exceptionalism”…… except when it comes to blaming America for everything. /sarc/
I think he means white suburban kids. A lit of black and Hispanic kids have to worrying about making it through the guantlet on their way to school.
Hmmm…so he’s calling for home schooling?!? Sounds great. My brother has done it with 10 kid’s and my son does it with my 3 grandkids. None shot!😄
Yeah, but do they know how to deal with a nuclear blast over their heads which vaporizes them?
Of course there will be fear, because he and his ilk keep pushing it. Never mind that 5X as many are killed in school-related transportation accidents than mass school shootings….
I had not really thought about that. Let’s ignore the private and public transportation accidents and consider only school busses carrying children to sporting events after school and on weekends. Which costs more student lives, mass shootings or bus accidents? I don’t *know*, but I bet I can guess! And we could end it, simply by eliminating intramural sports! Hey, if it saves *ONE* life, right?
Buckets of rocks, small cans of frozen juice concentrate, hockey pucks…even scissors to assault the “active shooter”…all have been issued or suggested by various Government entities both Federal and local. Surprisingly, they’ve left out pointed sticks….
Maybe the Schools should train every student in how to play Possum. Then, they can fool an active shooter into thinking there are no targets, which would take all the fun out of it and cause the shooter to leave…yeah…yeah…that’s the ticket…
Out of the options you listed, I’d take the pointed stick.
Esquire has always been an Urban Fruitmale rag.
Full of useless crap.
Not always, just for the last 30 years or so. It used to publish great literature written by men.
pops left me a drink book and a cook book from the fifties, both esquire publications. they are nicely done.
So let me get this straight. Our children are our most valuable asset, and losing even one as the cost if freedom is too much to bear. Did we not knowingly send hundreds of thousands of young men to Normandy during WWII to die for the very freedom that this coward desperately wishes to give away? Shameful.
Incidentally I find it extremely arrogant that there is this assumption that we as a country are so sophisticated that personal security is a right. It’s not a right. It’s a personal responsibility to handle yourself on some level, this isn’t and will never be a utopia without any violence.
Our kids are in more danger getting to school than while at school. More kids are killed by automobiles than by school shootings. More kids are abducted than are shot. It’s not really about safety and the gun. It’s about the illusion and the agenda. These idiots don’t give a rats ass about our kids. They hate home schools and they are as safe as it gets.
If you are packing, what would you be afraid of? Nukes? Explosives, IEDs? Arson?
With red flag laws, explosives, IEDs, and arson may become the methods of choice for mass murderers.
If you can carry and have received firearms and self-defense training, you should feel fairly confident in having the ability to protect yourself against the typical threats that you may encounter today (but maybe not tomorrow).
All of the proposed laws (gun control, red flag, etc.) will only give the upper hand to evil.
With a name like yours, I appreciate the irony of replying with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia
Besides that until The Pulse the worse night club mass murder by one person in the US was arson, with 32 dead. Lets be honest here if we’re keeping score that’s better than virtually all mass shooters. The only other things that we could talk about in similar scale would be Oklahoma City and 9/11 neither of which had guns in the main plot line. (Mcveigh had a pistol on him, but it went unused)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UpStairs_Lounge_arson_attack
‘They should be aware, constantly, that they are at risk of horrific injury or death while studying.’
Sure. And perhaps while we’re at it our children should be also aware that they are at risk of horrific injury or death if they don’t look both ways before crossing the street. Isn’t it better for children to understand risks so as to avoid horrific injury or death rather than being ignorant of the potential dangers in the world?
Perhaps we should get rid of child safety seats and seat belts, so children won’t have to be aware of the risks?
BTW, we need the edit button back.
That request has evidently fallen on deaf ears.
I don’t know who runs this blog now that Roberts gone.
But its on its way to irrelevance in too many ways.
Followed the link to the Parkland Commission that recommended in a 13 to 1 vote that teachers be armed. The no vote wasn’t saying no to armed defense in schools, he wanted the program to be about all the non-teaching staff.
Which made the vote unanimous for an armed defense inside schools, after a fashion.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/parkland-commissions-recommendation-for-armed-teachers-to-stop-school-shootings-draws-backlash/
I think a more accurate headline would be:
The same well-documented issues plaguing inner city public schools has finally managed to infiltrate the upper middle class schooling and now it’s suddenly “a crisis”.
Teachers don’t do guns. The staff of the school I worked in was over 70. There were three people I’d trust being armed. Two of us were retired military, the other an avid hunter.
Arming teachers means misplaced guns and guns “just going off.” Students will get their hands on guns. Most female teachers lock their purse in a desk or an office. They won’t be able to quickly get to a gun. We had a bomb threat at the end of the day. Males had their keys, female teachers didn’t. Their purses were left inside.
There is fatigue. Carrying a gun is a hassle. It gets in the way and needs to be maintained (cleaning and practice). In the Army I was very happy to get enough rank so I’d be issued a pistol in place of that damn M-16.
Wikipedia lists 37 schools that had gun events in 2018. About 8 had 3 or more shot or killed. That’s out of 120,000 some schools in the country.
True school shootings are extremely rare.
“Arming teachers means misplaced guns and guns “just going off.””
Except that there are states which allow teachers to carry guns and even states like mine where college students can carry. Misplaced guns and guns “just going off” haven’t been a problem in either situation. Even drunk-ass college kids are not losing their guns or having NDs. So it would seem that this fear is not justified in reality.
It’s a voluntary program. They are not going to randomly select people to be armed. Even within the constraints you cite there were three people who make your cut. That’s probably enough.
Virtually every person who comments here carried a gun on regular basis. It isn’t that of a burden for people who want to do it
Guns don’t have to be cleaned after every trip to the range. Modern polymer guns can go thousands of rounds with a cursory cleaning and lubrication. Even a 1911 can go a long time between major cleaning because modern powders and primers aren’t corrosive or leave a lot of residue. In the military they make soldiers clean their weapons regular whether they are fired or not to keep them busy.
It should not be voluntary, nor random. *EVERY* teacher should be armed or fired. After 10 years feel free to change that, there will have been zero school shootings for around 8 years by then, no longer fun.
Mandatory works only in military or cop land. Even then people do wash-out in training, or later. Making it mandatory on all teachers will only exclude good teachers who have no aptitude for firearms. Bad plan that.
We do not need every Tom, Dick and Alice to go armed. We need only enough of them to do so. Not just teachers, but janitors and coaches and cafeteria staff and bus drivers. The folks in the office area too.
And some people around here call me stupid.
Training to include live fire can certainly be mandatory. THEN, after they have some basis for making a decision, the teacher can make a decision. I’d be the average teacher is LESS likely to have touched a gun that the average citizen.
You’re talking like lifting a probibition is a mandate: let the three guys who already do guns carry in the school if they want to. That’s it.
The anti-people’s mis framing causes tangles like this. “Arming teachers.” As in “all the” teachers. Required. Nobody’s talking about that.
I have to believe it’s deliberate. Too precise. Too consistent. Too broadly used. Somebody’s running a well-provisioned messaging campaign.
Meanwhile, the same people are kind of O K with “school resource officers” who look like armed guards. Apparently, that’s not scary.
“Deliberate”? It’s OBVIOUS! Require teachers to be armed, or to check in with Burger King for a new job. The reason they keep assuming that is that it is clearly the answer, but they do not wish to admit it.
I assume he’s against fire extinguishers n fire drills? Cultivating fear, reminding of risk, and all that.
The family rifle hung on the wall for over 300 years without this horrific fad. Gun cases used to be made of ornate glass, not a bank vault.
Other than a few rare examples, this trend began within a single generation. The same generation that grew up with the internet and social media. That social media pumps “progressive” ideology into our youth 24/7. That ideology teaches that being a victim=being a hero. If you are unhappy, you are oppressed. If someone doesn’t like you, they are the enemy. So RESIST!
The result is fragile, emasculated young men capable of killing everyone they know just because someone called them a name on twitter, or the cool kids don’t like them.
Too much truth here. I work in a middle school for about 10 years following a 22 year military career. These kids, as a group, are narcissistic, self-entitled, and seldom if ever take responsibility (or for that matter, are held to account for their actions.) They “bully” each other on social media relentlessly and with out remorse. It is getting progressively worse each year. I could go on, but let me just say I encourage everyone I know with school age kids to home school or send to a good private school – whatever it takes. I’m continuing to work just so I can pay for my grandkids to not go to our public school district.
To prevent bullying on social media, do not provide your kid a phone. To eliminate other bullying, use the time he is not spending on social media to enroll him in martial arts classes. Really not so tough.
This dovetails rather nicely with the piece Elaine’s article from yesterday.
Living fear free isn’t a right and also isn’t possible. Fear promotes a response to that fear. Where the fear is rational then the response helps mitigate a risk. Wearing a helmet on a motorcycle, having a fire extinguisher or carrying a gun are all examples.
This Esquire article doesn’t talk about fear or a rational response to it. It promotes paranoia of firearms in general.
Ignore “regular school shootings” for a moment. The terrible truth is that it that terror attacks against schools DO happen. The author is either ignorant of or intentionally neglecting to mention the Beslan Massacre. Russia has some pretty tight restrictions on guns but that didn’t stop terrorists from seizing the school resulting in the deaths of like 334 people. Now, some of that was due to a ham handed government response but after recent events in this country does anyone really trust our government(s) to have a significantly better response?
Didn’t Esquire publish a cover article back in the day “The Case For Guns?”
Started as a letter to the editor replying to a massive anti-gun screed. Net: sensitive liberal guy got mugged by reality one too many times; acquires carry gun; has experience where having the gun probably saves his life. (CDC wouldn’t count this as a DGU as he just showed the gun. No matter. It’s not like they’d reoort the data anyway.)
Most interesting is this guy’s direct experience refuted every point in the anti article: no violence / no need, you can’t get one, it won’t help.
What an interesting headline.
“Boogy-man, Boogy-man; Fabulizing w Imputed Motives; Emotional beat, Emotional beat.”
The brilliant thing is programming all those elements into the zeitgeist, so they’ll come out when Holmes-guy writes his title.
Why not just admit that it’s statistically unlikely to die in a mass shooting over one’s lifetime and scrap the whole thing entirely? I mean it’s good enough to cause panic for gun control, why not have it swing the other way and have armed people who are ready, among our children and actually willing to defend them. The police have historically done a pretty poor job of dealing with mass shootings as they happened.
Esquire has gone full pearl-clutching, high estrogen girly man. It’s a fashion magazine for the feminized male.
Shouldn’t be in their desk. Should be around 3 o’clock in my thinking.
And my guess is that if the balloon goes up, the kids will hoping their teacher is armed.
Not with rocks.
Another 25 year old know it all.
Hey Jack, answer this one. Why is your generation the school shooting generation? Why did earlier generations not engage in this behavior? Mine certainly did not. I can’t recall any school shootings from my high school years.
Related: 66% of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is.
I’d wager that they’re all up to speed on selfies and Facebook though.
Sorry but all I can think about is Ms. Appleby writing on a blackboard with a 1911 on her hip. Hamina hamina….
The picture is beyond stupid. Door has a window, shooter can see people by and behind door. Pew pew through the door, no more teacher to grab gun. She looks like shes having fun though.
The Stoneman Douglas killer shot his victims in the hallway and through the window of the door. Most of the deaths could have been prevented by a few simple things that didn’t require guns.
Some liberal is venting?
I guess thats interesting. As long as the actually thinking people are in charge and ruling using actual logic, I’m good.
I just want to know how quickly they can vote the “1” in that “13-1” vote on the Parkland commission.
The one man that voted against arming teachers had a child die in the Parkland attack. Some people are very committed…
I bet his kids don’t do public school. They probably go to a fancy private school with security and no derelict jokers.
Dammit! I clicked the link and got the stupid all over me.
This isn’t going to wash out, is it?
When you use phrases like “arming teachers”, you have adopted the opposition’s framing. It sounds like issuing guns and adding responsibilities to people who want neither.
Instead, use more accurate phrases like “allowing teachers to arm themselves if they want” or “cease prohibiting armed teachers” or “offering even more training to teachers who already want it.”
The left are very over dramatic.
If and when school’s are armed, its no longer a soft target zone and we will have less school shootings.
Then the left will find something else to politicize and be over dramatic about.
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