Reason is a fragile thing. Like a tiny, dainty woodland sprite, it can be stomped into a crushed, broken ruin by the mighty foot of ignorance employed by those cynically seeking to advance their agendas. We see this every day, and the biggest feet dancing with hobnailed boots upon poor Reason wherever it tries to peep out of the undergrowth belong to the Progressive Left. Consider a recent example.
David Hogg, who has turned surviving the Parkland massacre into a career, is vilifying the NRA for “murdering” his fellow students. He likes to use obscenities in his speechifying and proudly sports a “We Call B.S.” lapel pin, because using vulgarities makes him feel like an adult who knows what those words mean. Polite debate isn’t for him. He’s a passionate spouter of truth, and if you don’t like obscenities, you must be, like, really old and stuff. So shut up while he figuratively slaps you around with naughty words his mom should have told him he shouldn’t use. She probably didn’t expect the nation’s media to gleefully encourage her boy to go blue.
Hogg says he’s not for repealing the Second Amendment. He only wants “common sense” gun laws. Gun rights advocates have heard this many times before, and despite more and more laws, there always seems to be more and more “common sense” proposals to restrict guns. It somehow never produces a gun violence-free world. The failure of the new laws justifies more laws, which also fail, and so on.
Hogg may say he doesn’t want gun confiscation, but the process he endorses will lead to that, and most of his followers want this to happen. You want a gun to protect your family? No way, dude. We have police for that. They may arrive in time to chalk an outline around you and your family’s corpses while they’re still warm. It’ll look a bit like those decals you see in the rear windows of minivans.
Hogg has his limits. When Parkland’s educators declared students would be required to use transparent backpacks, he called it a violation of the First Amendment. “It’s embarrassing for a lot of the students,” he said. Your right to self-defense with the best device for that purpose must be sacrificed in tribute to Hogg’s dream of an end to all gun violence, but a student’s right to keep what they stow away in their backpack secret is sacred.
Hogg’s fellow students don’t like see-through backpacks, so he doesn’t either. Hogg claims politicians who don’t support his gun grabbing are being paid off by the NRA. Politicians who cater to their supporters are wrong but Hogg’s pandering to his base is okay. He and his followers wore $1.05 price tags, said to represent the amount Senator Marco Rubio got per Florida student from the NRA. Hogg’s supporters are rewarding him with praise, flattering TV interviews and great expectations for his future—scholarships, internships, a book, and maybe a movie deal, plus a possible political career. A politician accepting the support of those who share his beliefs is evil, but Hogg’s rocket ride is pure. If he gets into public office, he’ll certainly not take donations from anyone bad.
What are America’s students to do while awaiting Hogg’s era of no gun violence? Many educators, or at least education administrators and teachers’ union leaders, don’t want to allow protectors armed with guns in schools.
Dr. David Helsel, the superintendent of the Blue Mountain School District, in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, has the answer: “Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone. If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full students armed with rocks and they will be stoned.”
Superintendent Helsel’s district does have an armed protector, a single maintenance employee, who will no doubt drop his mop or hammer and rush to the defense of students, but Helsel says the district won’t arm teachers. Instead, the students have been trained to barricade themselves in their classrooms then use that bucket of rocks if the classroom’s door and that lone maintenance guy fail to protect them.
The ineffectiveness of this is illustrated by the only stonings publicized in recent years. These are in Islamic regions where transgressors ruled guilty of adultery have been stoned to death. Sometimes the victims are bound or partially buried in the ground so they can’t flee or resist and must endure the slow process of being pummeled to death by rocks. The restrained victims certainly aren’t permitted a firearm, for even the barbaric perpetrators of these brutal acts know that a gun beats a rock.
David nailed Goliath with a rock, but he used a sling to sling it. It wasn’t the kind of forked-stick-and-inner-tube-strip gizmo that kids use to fire pebbles. David’s sling was a hunting implement composed of two cords attached to a pouch in which a rock was set. The cords were swung round in a large arc then released. The rock would then fly with much greater speed than if thrown by hand. A sling can send a rock over 400 yards and when used by an expert, like David, could hit a target, like Goliath’s noggin, with powerful, deadly precision.
David, a shepherd, gained his skill by killing predators preying on his sheep but the sling was also a weapon of war. Ancient armies employed massed slingers to rain rocks on their enemies. Perhaps if Dr. Helsel issues slings to his students, raises the ceilings in their classrooms so they can get a good swing, gives them regular practice in hurling rocks at a target, say an outline of Marco Rubio, and trains them to hurl as a group in unison, his rock strategy might work.
But, lacking this, expecting a caveman tactic executed by children to defeat a shooter with a gun is just stupid. A teacher with a firearm could do a better job. It’s what David would have used if he’d had one.
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