And Yet Again: Guns Are Not Protection

Following the NRA's lead, Donald Trump is suggesting that teachers get paid more to carry guns in the classroom. Sharing the NRA's delusion that more guns make people safer, he thinks that armed teachers with Glock 17s in their purses or desk drawers will somehow stop "cowardly sickos" who bring AR-15s into the classroom.

How will Trump explain it when a teacher's gun is stolen and a dozen kids are dead?

Think about it: arming teachers and coaches makes it trivial for school shooters to get guns in schools: all a shooter needs to do is bash a coach with a baseball bat and now he's got a gun provided by Donald Trump and the NRA.

But let's pretend that students will never be able to take the gun from a teacher. Having a weapon does not protect you from gunfire. It just makes you target number one. When a gunman enters a room he will simply put six rounds in the teacher before firing on his ex-girlfriend or the bully who's been picking on him since sixth grade.

Look at Afghanistan. Sure, the Taliban carries out attacks on soft targets like markets and government ministries. But they more frequently attack police stations and military outposts where everyone has guns. A high percentage of school shooters are suicidal and know full well that they'll eventually meet armed resistance from security guards and the police. They are hoping to go down in a blaze of gunfire, glory and blood spatter. That's their endgame.

Armed teachers will not deter these shooters -- the idea of armed teachers may even excite them, making it an even bigger challenge. More shooters will wear Kevlar, something that is easily bought on the Internet because of its great popularity among the gun cult and conservative survivalist "preppers."

At best arming teachers will only reduce the number of victims. The shooter will enter a classroom by stealth, shoot the teacher and twenty or thirty students. If an armed teacher in another classroom hears the attack, he'll fetch his gun and seek out the shooter. Odds are basically 50-50 that the teacher will die, because his handgun will be less powerful and less accurate than the AR-15 the mass murderer is carrying, and the killer may even be wearing ballistic armor, since he came prepared.

For years the NRA has been lobbying for silencers, which will make school shootings even more deadly.

If the shooter has a silencer -- something the NRA has been lobbying actively for for years because they want kids to use them -- the shooter may not be detected for many minutes because no one can hear the gunfire.

Arming teachers will also kill many students who would not have otherwise died: teachers will shoot kids they think have guns, but don't -- cops do this all the time. Kids will take guns from hesitant teachers and shoot them. Shooters will use other students as cover and teachers will shoot innocent bystanders. Ricochets will hit innocents. Kids will be shot accidentally when guns fall out of waistbands in the hall.

This shows the hypocrisy of the NRA. They don't want to stop gun violence, they want to sell more guns and more gun accessories. They want to turn this country into an armed camp, where people live in walled neighborhoods patrolled by armed guards and a machine gun nest on every block. They want schools to be prisons in perpetual lockdown mode, where teachers are armed guards and principals are wardens.

For the NRA school shootings are a marketing opportunity to increase the prevalence of guns in American society. They like school shootings because they can use them to sell the delusion that more guns make us safer.

The NRA opposes any and all gun control measures because, they say, gun control won't stop all shootings, and the bad guys will be able to get guns "somehow." By that same logic, arming teachers is an even bigger waste of time and money, because it can't stop all shootings because bad guys fire first.

Why should the NRA's Second Amendment trump every other American right, including the right to life?