Wednesday, July 02, 2003
The annoying thing about this new blogger is that the interface on MAC is drastically different than the interface on PC. And I really hate this one on MAC. Just another reason I will remain a PC user til I die.
Ok, so Kimber, what's your beef today? My beef is, as it is every day, the fact that I don't get cable anymore. As a result I don't get to see MSNBC and I miss stuff like
this. An entire hour of Chris Matthews verbally pounding the crap out of conservatives. But the truly artistic piece of this show was the fact that Ann Coulter
required no active interplay to make her look like a bigotted ass. (She got active interplay because otherwise Chris Matthews would get no ratings at all.) But I must say reading the transcript was akin to perusing the Necronomicon in the feelings it generated. If I wasn't so outraged by the fact that people can stand up today in broad daylight in front of hundreds of millions of people, spew that kind of obvious, one-sided, you're wrong because you don't agree with me, Muslim bashing hate speech and NO ONE is offended by it I would have been carried away in near nirvanic rapture. This woman felt not only justified but almost deified in her position as adjudicator over the entire liberal population of the country. We are all traitors because we don't blindly trust and follow GW, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. Because we don't agree that what
they feel is in the best interest of the country actually
is...we are unpatriotic. And the fact that we argue with them about it just confirms the fact.
Another portion of this show dealt with arming teachers in the schools. Goddess help us all. I remember right after Columbine, some crackpot from my very favorite Special Interest Group, the NRA, came on the Today show and said that the answer to this is to arm the teachers. I wrote an email to my congrespeople at the time as there was some very important legislation coming up that summer around gun control. You can read it
here.
There are two basic reasons why, in my own humble opinion, that arming teachers is a
really bad idea. One, teachers have to build an honest, trusting relationship with their students if they are going to be able to effectively teach. We must remember that this is the principal mission of a school, to teach the children. To give them the best education they can so the child will grow up to be a productive member of society. If you turn the teacher into what is basically an armed prison guard, you remove that ability to build a relationship. You have basically placed a .45 caliber barrier between the student and his education. Now if it were up to me, no one would be armed in the schools. I have absolutely no civil rights issues with metal detectors, surprise locker searches, backpack or even car searches in the case of older children. I could even be convinced of personal searches in the case of probable cause. But if we must bow to the homicidal majority, let them come up with some
additional, non-scholastic funds to put police officers or rent-a-cops in the classrooms.
Besides this fact, there is the fact that the majority of the classroom teachers in this country would cringe at the thought of shooting one of the children they are working with, building a relationship with and trying to teach. My hubby wants to be a teacher and he would actually rather take a bullet than shoot a child.
Now, on to my second point. I have 2 children. Neither of which, the gods willing, will ever touch a gun. We are bringing them up to be non-violent and with my son, at least, it is something he has a natrual inclination for in any case. I
DO NOT want my children caught in the
crossfire between student A and teacher B in history class. One set of bullets flying around is frightening enough. If this is something that would seem to be a problem, see opinion 1. Hire security guards or police officers. Search everyone entering or exiting the school.
Yikes. This issue just drives me up a wall. And I did want to include this quote here because I do love it so...
RUMMEL: The problem with the more guns-less crime hypothesis is that if more guns really did mean less crime, America would be the safest country in the world. Instead, America has the highest gun violence rate of any other industrialized nation.
And on that note....I bid you a fond, good afternoon from New England.
posted by Unknown
at 2:53 PM ::
~#~
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