Friday, January 11, 2013

Keeping the elephants away

The guy on the radio insisted, over and over again, that no school with an armed guard had ever suffered an armed attack.

Except at Columbine.  And yesterday in the high school in California.  And Virginia Tech.  The latter, ironically, being cited by the guy on the radio as a reason his Texas public school board authorized teachers to carry concealed weapons.  Except, as in Utah, this is another example of keeping the elephants away.  Texas hasn't had a mass shooting at a school in 30 years.  Longer than that, actually: the last mass shooting at a Texas school was the infamous assault by Charles Whitman on the UT campus in 1966.  The last mass shooting in Texas was more recent (2009), but it was at a place with a lot of armed people around:  Fort Hood, Texas.

Still, you can't argue with success.  I'm sure he hasn't seen any elephants near his school, either.

So it's a double benefit!

2 comments:

  1. Makes me want to bang my head against the wall. What could possibly go wrong in a shootout in a school?

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  2. I don't think we've had one here and guns aren't allowed in schools.

    How about that correlation between numbers of guns held and murder rate? Or executions?

    I'm depressed at how this is turning into a competing war of self-exoneration between the gun industry and the publishing-entertainment industries. I'm afraid that lost in that will be the fact that they are both suspects in a mass killing epidemic.

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