NRA wrong about armed guards in schools

> I wonder how many of those little kids and teachers in Newtown would have been saved by prayers and the 10 commandments?

I think what the author is really trying to say is if we raise our children with a respect for law and order (10 Commandments) and a reverence for God who values life we might see less bloodshed down the road. As a former LEO and investigator I can definitely say that how the children are raised determines who they will become later in life. I’ve walked into non-christian homes where it was evident that the parents did not take care of their homes, were drug users, screamed at their children and didn’t encourage them and later saw those very same children become hardened criminals. Conversely I’ve watched children raised in good Christian homes that grew up o be polite, we-mannered, hardworking and contributing members to society. So does God make a difference in how children turn out? You betcha and big time...

Back in the 1980s, I knew a high school principal who was concerned that race based groups of students were starting to turn on each other. His response was to hire a really huge, partially-disabled combat veteran (two fake ears, hearing aids, and uglier than a mud fence after a hard rain.)

He was armed, which was sort of redundant. In any event, he solved any race problem very quickly; but then the principal discovered another problem that to that point had been invisible.

It was an open campus, and adults were sneaking on to the campus for various reasons, either illegal or menacing.

Within a few years, the security guy received several performance based raises, and last I heard had his own fire team of veterans keeping students safe. They had made several arrests of adults: drug dealers, burglars, and a couple of non-custodial parents trying to kidnap their children from their ex-spouses.

“...Do you think I’d teach every school teacher and administrator for free? That I’d go to the local schools and sit there (armed) a couple afternoons a week? For no pay? In a New York minute.”

Well said sir, and much more in line with how the Israeli fixed a similar, more pervasive problem in their schools. Am similarly inclined, differently credentialed, but “in a heartbeat” about sums it up.

Stay alert

Occasionally, even WND says something I can agree with.

Of course, the “armed police” idea was a temporary solution as proposed by the NRA, until they could get their volunteer training program running.

The long-term solution was to provide training for school employees.

Of course, school employees are government workers, so that kind of goes against Farah’s argument that we don’t need more government guns. But maybe he’s assuming that if a government worker uses their own gun, it’s not really a government gun.

Since Farah does call for armed and trained teachers and administrators, he doesn’t really seem to be against government control of weapons in school. He simply seems to have a problem with police officers.

So in the end, maybe he wasn’t as sane here as it looks at first blush.

Laws are a balance between the freedom of the law-abiding, and the security of the law-abiding.

We could be virtually “perfectly safe”, at the cost of our freedom — until the oppression gave rise to a revolution.

Or we could be perfectly free, at the cost of our security, in the end we’d have little freedom because the most powerful among us would rule the day.

I use cars as an analogy. Driving a car is not considered a right by the Supreme Court. We are allowed to license, to restrict, to ban if we want. We can set any rules we want. 33,000 people are killed on the roads in this country.

More interestingly, if you look at a chart of car deaths by country, you’ll find that our ranking isn’t much different than our ranking on gun deaths compared to other developed countries.

We could largely stop car deaths. A combination of 45-mph maximum speed limits (enforced by speed limiters installed in cars if necessary), and installation of various safety features found in NASCAR, like full body harnesses, a re-work of the entire road system to provide few places for head-on collisions, etc.

The cost would be prohibitive for some things. Others the cost would be our freedom. For some reason, we have decided that our freedom to drive fast, and even faster than the speed limit, is more important than the lives of people, including children, killed in car accidents.

But government, as it assumes more “responsibility” for keeping us safe, also has assumed more power to control us, to keep us from CHOOSING to do things that might make us less safe. Like banning activities dangerous only to ourselves.

In my column this week, I argued that we have to at least consider that our schools are already “safe enough”. The schools are the safest place for children; they are much more likely to be harmed outside of school.

I am beginning to think the key is to simply remove any federal control over guns in schools. Let the states and localities decide for themselves. Then parents can decide through elections, and through their own actions, how much protection they want for their kids.

I would support trained school employees having guns. But I already feel my kids are quite safe from this particular threat in our schools.

Most of all what America needs is a genuine return to God in which, at the very least, those who profess belief in Him follow the prescription of 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

This is a common, but grossly incorrect, interpretation of this Scripture. The correct interpretation is that, under the Law -- under the Old Testament -- the Promise is to God's people the Jews, in their land Israel, and for that land, eretz Israel only, under a king appointed by The God. It does not apply to any other land, including The U. S. of A.

Under the New Covenant, the promises to Christians is for and about the Kingdom of The God, of which the Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed, "My Kingdom is not of this world (kosmos, the world system)" (Jn. 18:36).

Though the formulation of the documents of the founding of the United States followed Christian principles and polity, we have never been a "Christian nation." We have been a nation of laws under which the Christian religion may be freely practiced and dominant; but also under which atheism, agnosticism, and other religions may be tolerated, but not expected to prosper under correct application of the law as intended by the Founders.

If the land is sick, it is because we allowed it to get that way. Any healing must come from uniformly interpreting and applying the law as the Founders understood and demonstrated what they had imposed. The healing should start in the pulpits, then in the families, the schools, and finally in the streets, IMHO.

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