This past Monday as math teacher Mike Landsberry lay shot and dying on a playground’s basketball court in Sparks, Nevada, America’s public education system on the East Coast was already at work subjecting more children to the perils of another lethal threat: political correctness. Make no mistake about it -- political correctness is the impetus of gun-free zones. It is also destroying the minds of America’s children while leaving them physically vulnerable.
Incredibly, teacher unions and other progressive liberals hail this indoctrination in public schools as an advancement in education. But as disturbing as that fact may be, this ever-expanding educational rot goes unnoticed by a plethora of apathetic parents. Meanwhile, the curriculum of political correctness deserves plenty of credit for this week’s random terror by an out-of-control seventh grader with a 9mm handgun who executed Mr. Landsberry and attempted to murder two 12-year-old classmates before killing himself.
As a recovering high school English teacher, I do not find this tragedy or any of the other school shootings surprising at all. Compelling teachers to focus on feelings, self-esteem, and gay rights leaves teachers with little time to teach students about critical thinking and fact analysis — you know, skills students will probably need in life, particularly should they ever be confronted with a murderer at school.
I have endured the liberal influence and caustic system firsthand, and I promise you that something is seriously wrong on every level when a student reaches high school still reading and writing at a third-grade level. The students’ pervasive apathy is even more disheartening. Students are often infected with a self-absorbed, entitlement attitude that seems intentionally cultivated as the system passes them along whether they are academically competent or not. Of course, if their makeup, clothing, or gadgets are socially acceptable, who cares if they cannot think, let alone read or write?
Deficient students (often encouraged by inept parents) generally expect grades they have not earned. They justify their shoddy performances and their degenerate peers because they feel entitled to their actions, as well as their inflated grades. I guess it is hard to blame them really when you consider the system has conditioned them to expect full credit for just completing an assignment.
Rachel Jeantel, the prosecution’s embarrassing witness in the George Zimmerman trial, may provide a visual of the results that government education is producing. If not, perhaps then the 19-year-old “student” I had in my freshman English class will work better. Of course, the class was not called “Freshman English.” A commonsense course title like that could have hurt the grown man’s feelings. (He already had enough to worry about with his 15-year-old girlfriend expecting a child.)
Regarding school shootings, however, the public education system is producing graduates who stumble in to society spouting anti-gun messages they do not understand. But what should we expect? Everything they know about firearms they have learned from watching liberal, anti-gun news sources or staring at a poster of a little black gun with a red line running through it for eight hours a day rather than through just one month of quality firearm safety and proficiency instruction. When you consider how such ignorance impacts social values and dictates our political conversations, this failure to educate students is nothing more than reprehensible.
So, in light of the puff piece that passes for education these days, it leaves little wonder to folks like myself as to why a guy cannot even finish the serious suggestion of arming teachers. Such trust and independence are not compatible with the government propaganda machine that masquerades as education. Before the thought ever gets fully expressed, the disciples of feelings will frantically fire back with vague, emotional gobbledygook meant to cloud an incredibly morose problem.
But childish slogans like This School is Proudly Gun-Free do nothing to protect children when murderers decide to make the schools gun occupied.
Other slogans like Remove Guns, Reduce Deaths are flat-out duplicitous. The CDC reports the exact opposite, but if a bunch of liberal moms and dads chant it loudly enough, maybe they will eventually stop the body count at public schools from rising.
These useless slogans go on and on because liberals apparently believe that nothing protects defenseless children like a bunch of melodramatic emotions that have no foundation in facts.
Ironically, we should blame the insane self-esteem curriculum peddled in public schools for most of the massacres, not guns. Government schools are creating an epidemic of megalomaniacs who have absolutely no firearm experience — let alone any practical evidence to support their anti-gun phobia. Then again, I will concede that many have just been conditioned to feel that they are “qualified” to tell the rest of us that an armed teacher has no business protecting children at school. Self-righteous liberals simply shrug off the obvious dangers inherent to their gun-less vision for the world and focus instead on how they feel. Worse, they invent baseless, hypothetical scenarios where more guns lead to more deaths or more crimes while their fairy tales run diametrically opposite to the existing empirical evidence showing a steady decrease in crime as firearm sales climb.
But perhaps worst of all, liberals ignore the fact that mass murderers flock to free-fire zones. Meanwhile, mentally balanced Americans are stuck with that deadly reality.
If more murderers were still alive after people with guns finally show up, we could demand answers from them as to why they preyed on soft targets instead of local shooting ranges or police departments. But do we really need to do that? Mentally stable people (or just anyone who attended school 60 years ago) already know the answer. Unarmed school children make far less risky targets for murderous lunatics.
Granted, arming teachers is not guaranteed protection against killers. But in terms of realistic self-defense, it is simple arithmetic. More guns in the hands of mentally stable, law-abiding citizens reduces crime. And an armed teacher acting from an entrenched position inside a classroom provides far better protection than the deep thoughts emanating from that Guns Don’t Belong in Schools poster or a bullet riddled corpse lying in a playground and maybe even holding an emergency whistle.