"Safe schools"

Guns Magazine, Feb, 2005 by David Codrea

Three hundred and thirty hostages, including 172 children, are massacred by Islamic terrorists during a school siege in Beslan, Russia.

A computer disk found in Iraq contains diagrams, photographs and information about American schools.

The AP reports "The Education Department has advised school leaders nationwide to watch for people spying on their buildings or buses to help detect any possibility of terrorism like the deadly school siege in Russia."

The government is advising schools to improve security, to install locks on doors and windows, to limit building entryways. As if that will stop terrorists.

What will?

Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America tells us that in Israel, "schools in border areas, and school buses, were manned with gun-toting teachers ... the Israeli government announced plans to issue 40,000 more gun licenses to civilians ... (and) is giving away guns to teachers."

The people keeping and bearing arms. There's a proactive plan that seems to work--as has occasionally been proven in our country. Remember, at Littleton, the attackers fled when the school's armed guard returned fire. And remember incidents of armed citizens stopping gunmen at Pearl, MS, and the Appalachian Law School. (We need to remember, because the establishment press will not--economist John Lott reports "out of 208 news stories in the week after the [Appalachian] event, just four mentioned that the students who stopped the shooter had guns.")

Unfortunately, federal and state laws forbid possessing firearms except in narrowly defined circumstances, in many cases within 1,000 feet of school grounds. In other words, schools are mandated law-abiding citizen disarmament zones. Agreeing, inexplicably, is NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who declared at the 1999 annual meeting "we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools, that means no gun in America's schools, period ... with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel."

So what are we left with?

The Education Department points us to: The 3 R's to Dealing with Trauma in Schools: Readiness, Response and Recovery. The project is co-chaired by Deborah Prothrow-Stith, MD, of the Harvard School of Public Health, who has stated "I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned."

Meanwhile, The Washington Times reports: "U.S. security officials are investigating a recent intelligence report that a group of 25 Chechen terrorists illegally entered the United States from Mexico in July. The Chechen group is suspected of having links to Islamist terrorists ..."

In the face of monsters who are not above sawing off their hostages heads, what priorities are being focused on by the educational establishment?

News Item (AP): "The school board has voted to ban a photo of a student from the senior section of his high school yearbook because he is posed with a shotgun."

News Item (AP): "A teen-age Civil War buff has been suspended from school and faces serious charges after his replica musket was found in his car trunk at school."

Facing an unprecedented terrorist threat, official "readiness" policies mandate that we become conditioned sheep. This is insane.