Perhaps she is going for a dark horse Fucking Idiot of the Year award?
Or maybe this is one of the emotional scars of having attended a school by the name of Battle Ground High School?
It’s Hard to say. But it’s truly idiotic. Washington state Representative Liz Pike (R-18):
…wants to bring up a bill that would let teachers carry concealed guns in the classroom.
Under Pike’s proposal, teachers at schools like Salmon Creek Elementary could volunteer to go through mental evaluations and week-long gun training at their own expense. They would also buy their own guns to bring into their classes and wear on a belt or in a holster – not in a purse or drawer.
A good way to protect students and teachers? Hmmmm.
You may have read, just last week, about an “incident” in a New Jersey police station:
A shootout broke out in a suburban New Jersey police station on Friday when a 39-year-old man who had been taken into custody attacked a police officer, stealing her gun and shooting her and two other officers before he was killed.
I’ve been told numerous similar stories from my father and step mother, who were both Chicago police officers for most of their working lives. Fortunately, the cops usually win these spontaneous altercations without losing control of their guns. But police officers are rigorously and recurrently trained in self defense, weapons handling, and dealing with aggressive persons.
Teachers? Not so much.
Additionally, teachers work, day in and day out, with a much higher proportion of crazy people than do the cops. By, “crazy people”, I mean most adolescent males who need at least a decade to learn how to handle the new phenomena of being constantly hepped up on sex hormones. And I’m just talking naturally produced stuff….
What we definitely don’t need in schools is to provide impulse-control challenged adolescent males new opportunities to exercise their testosterone-induced aggression instincts with the temptation of a loaded gun for victory! Doing so is a recipe for more gun-related deaths in schools—not fewer.
So, yes…Rep. Liz Pike does gets my vote for the 2012 Fucking Idiot of the Year award.
Yeah, and a week-long firearms safety class a few years ago will totally prepare you for a live shooter and a classroom full of screaming kids. Police departments have squads that constantly train and prepare for such situations precisely because regular cops aren’t sufficiently trained to always respond well in that situation. Mrs. Miller in Salmon Creek Elementary? Don’t make me laugh. Or weep.
Oh yeah, I want my elderly 1st grade teacher packing heat. Still, looking back on it, I bet she could have handled it. 1st grade teachers are tough.
My 2nd and 3rd grad grade teachers, no, they would have been worthless.
As the article opened with. Jr High and High school boys can be terrors. In my Jr high, we drove our aging coasting to retirement homeroom teacher into a screaming mental break down almost weekly. They though it was fun. She would have easily shot a dozen early teen tormenters if she had had a gun at that point.
I guess the NRA would say we need to arm the teenagers in that case.
What we NEED is prudent, reasonable gun regulations and funded mental health programs.
Republicans assholes will fight both of those logical proposals.
No doubt Rep. Pike (R-Dingbatistan) would also like to show her…(ahem!) “concern” for teachers by busting their wages.
“… busting their wages.”
I’d say the teachers’ wages are just fine, thank you very much!
@4…as long as you don’t have to live on ’em, eh?
I’m rather familiar with that particular corner of our state. The Vancouver/Battle Ground area has a very large population of Christian conservatives, including a cousin of mine and her extended family, and a fellow I used to work with a couple of jobs ago. In general I get along pretty well with those folks–I’m Catholic myself, and that co-worker and I did a lot of business travel together. It was refreshing to be with someone who didn’t think it weird when I bowed my head and gave thanks before eating in a restaurant. That being said, those folks as a group tend to vote for candidates who loudly proclaim their “discipleship” in the public square…even if said candidates behind the scenes are bought and paid for by the modern-day ilk of the moneychangers Jesus drove out of the Temple.
I wonder how many parents want their kids in the same classroom as a scared teacher with a gun?
@4 You don’t need to work so hard at reducing your credibility to zero. It’s already there.
@6:
Let’s just admit it: Clark County is extreme-northwest Mississippi, the safe place for Teahadists otherwise forced to endure the (to them) godless hippiecommiepagannaziso-shul-ism of Portland. Pike is a prime example of that crashing ignorance.
Same area that Jaime Herrera Beutler is from…
It is an incredibly stupid idea from a really stupid woman, apparently. What is more frightening is that there are probably quite a few gun nuts who think it’s a good idea. These are the people who fancy themselves as “Dirty Harry,” or some version of the fictional righteous hero with a firearm who saves the day.
The teenage boy issue is a significant issue. The mass shooters are either teen age boys or boys just beyond their teen years.
I would also say that most gun deaths—the ones committed by “law-abiding” gun owners in their own homes are also issues of impulse control. Without a gun, in the rage of the moment, one of these losers throws a plate, or calls someone a name. With a gun, they pull a trigger.
In the classroom, the number one goal of boys will be to find the gun and waive it about, or shoot it. Remember all those pain in the ass groups of shitheads you went to high school with? Yeah, imagine them posturing with the teacher’s pistol.
What a dumb bunny Pike is. And that is all she is a stupid dumb bunny.
“impulse-control challenged adolescent males new opportunities to exercise their testosterone-induced aggression instincts”
Just get them some pussy. We can solve the whole mess with a new whore corps…
As for the issue, the whole thing is absurd. A whole country ginned up over 20 kids dead in a freak incident.
Cowards… This country is awash in cowardice. Why else would we need insurance for every single thing we do?
It would be a problem but for tyrants who are seizing the opportunity to attack the second amendment and through it the whole bill of rights. The second amendment was specifically written to be a last resort against creeps like Bloomberg or Feinstien. We can’t let them grab any more power.
“I bowed my head and gave thanks before eating in a restaurant”
A month ago I had a chance to say grace in a restaurant, one that I had learned as a kid,
“Come Lord Jesus and be our guest,
and let these gifts to us be blessed.
In Jesus name, Amen.”
There was some surprise expressed by my friends that I knew one like that.
@14
That’s the only prayer I ever knew as a kid, until one time I was at dinner at a friend’s and as we all bowed our heads his dad said Horseshit said the sparrow, lets eat.
“@4 You don’t need to work so hard at reducing your credibility to zero. It’s already there.”
Pot calling the kettle black, rodent!
@5,
No, they’re doing just fine. It’s the people in the private sector that are struggling.
# 6: It is a little strange out hear saying grace at a meal in a public resident. I grew up in the Bible Belt, and nobody there would have thought a thing about it. We knew we were in a considerably different place when we moved out here, and in the middle of a short grace, an obviously aggravated waitress interrupted insisting she had to have our drink refills RIGHT THEN!. Fortunatly, we later found out she was in the small minority. Other folks don’t have to be Christians, or Muslims, or whatever, that’s their decision. But interrupting a prayer is just downright rude. It’s not like it’s going to last a half hour or so.
But I’ve never been able to reconcile the idea of carrying a handgun and being a Christian. Doesn’t the Bible say to “turn the other cheek”? Either you believe it and put it into practice, or you don’t.