Eleven miles in 1:26 around Liberty Park. Nothing like a soft, wood-chip surface for the old legs. Nice and sunny at the beginning of the run but got progressively colder and windier. Not a bad run. I feel the urge to weigh in on the whole school safety/gun control debate. I've been teaching in high schools for the past seventeen years so I feel I have something to add to the debate. I have several points. 1. There are about 300 million guns in this nation. No gun control legislation passed by congress will do a single thing to make schools safer in the short term. Those 300 million guns aren't going anywhere anytime soon. 2. At every high school that I have taught at, we have had an armed police officer on duty during the school day. I like this and I think it makes our schools safer. Two armed police officers would make me feel even safer still. The fact that there was an armed police officer at Columbine is NOT an argument against having them. We are all grown-up and realize that nothing is ever going to be 100% effective. To make fun of the NRA's proposal to have an armed police officer in every school is just plain stupid. People who do that are putting their partisan ideology ahead of common sense. 3. Beware of anyone who argues that any one thing is the solution to this problem. We have a gun problem, we have a mental illness problem, we have a parenting problem, and we have a school funding problem that precludes some common-sense solutions. 4. Every high school teacher, if asked to do so, could provide law enforcement and school administration with the names of one or two young men they teach who are the most likely to shoot up a school either now or in the future. We could then monitor their Facebook pages, twitter accounts etc. That is, if we were serious about this problem. 5. Finally, if all parents would raise children who lived lives of meaning and commitment, who had activities and interests in their lives that enriched their lives and gave them a sense of self worth, we wouldn't have this problem at all. "I can't wait until Christmas vacation so I can frickin play Assassins Creed all day, every day" - actual quote heard by me while walking down the hallway at Alta High School last Tuesday. And parents wonder why their kids are screwed up!
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