Important headlines for April 12th – No to armed educators & Knife control
Bottom Line: These are stories you don't want to miss and my hot takes on them...
Excerpt: “To leave $67 million on the table is just a travesty,” said school board member Robin Bartleman. “We should definitely launch a campaign to persuade the governor — for those districts who don’t want to arm their employees, that they give us the money to keep our children safe in other ways, as opposed to leaving it there.”
Under a new state law passed in the weeks following the massacre, school staff members, including some with teaching duties, would be allowed to carry concealed firearms, if law enforcement officials and school boards choose to participate in the program. The program initially called for arming teachers, but opposition from teachers, parents and school administrators killed that provision.
Hot Take: So, a law passes that you're allowed to opt out of at the local level. You choose to do so but then want the law to be broken so you can obtain what you liked attached to what you opted out of under the law? That's special. About as special as a member of the board saying they didn't have one teacher or one student that wanted armed teachers. That's also special, for two reasons. First, because the law didn't allow for classroom teachers to participate in the program to carry on campus. Second, because teachers have reached out to me. Kind of odd that certain teachers are more confident reaching out to a talk show host than a board member isn't it? I've been informed that the environment with many colleagues is closed-minded and toxic for those who don't share the assumed mindset. That's ironic when educators and those in leadership are so closed minded do you think? Wouldn't you say that those who dismiss the prospect out of hand citing that the notion of armed faculty is ridiculous, is in itself ridiculous given that 18 states successfully employ that very strategy? Wouldn't you say that it's useful information that 20% of existing teachers say they'd want the ability?
But then again this is the same crowd that doesn't teach that more lives are saved by defensive use of firearms than taken by them in the United States or that three times as many lives are taken by knives than by all rifles combined annually. By why let facts and safety get in the way of a political agenda in our schools right?
Now They're Coming for People's Knives. No, Really. Barton Hinkle, Times-Dispatch
Excerpt: You’d better sit down for this one. London has been suffering a spate of homicides recently, bad enough that some contend the murder rate is now worse than New York’s.
In light of that crime spike London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has laid down the law. “No excuses,” he declared the other day on Twitter. “There is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.”
Britain imposes strict gun control. It also imposes absurdly strict knife control. The government forbids carrying a knife in public “without good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting edge 3 inches long or less.”
Hot Take: Hmm...so you mean gun control hasn't stopped killers from killing people? And it's almost like I've got stats on knives being responsible for more deaths than guns too. But yes, knife control isn't a joke it's a reality. But I'm sure that the killers will abide by the law right up until the time they decide to start killing people right?
Until tomorrow...