Why Teachers Shouldn’t Carry Guns

What’s the Latest Development?

The National Rifle Association held a press conference this morning calling for the nation’s teachers to carry lethal weapons into the classroom in order to make schools a safe learning environment for children. “Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the NRA, said that children had been put in danger by ‘laws for gun-free school zones’ and by having ‘unarmed principals.’ … At what might have been a moment of humility for the organization, he said that people ‘driven by demons’ were among us, along with a ‘much larger, more lethal criminal class,’ and that the only way to stop them was with guns.”

What’s the Big idea?

The NRA has now pledged to develop a National Model School Shield Program and to work to put an armed employee in every school. The announcement, being taken seriously by news organizations everywhere, undoes the NRA’s mission of gun advocacy: “This is where gun advocacy ends: not with a right to bear arms, but with an insistence that the rest of us have an obligation to do so. In the name of a misreading of the Second Amendment, teachers and children are conscripted in a gunfight. A movement that frames its cause as liberty imposes fear, and service only to the gun.”

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