Gun Violence and Miniature Sherman Tanks
President Trump says he is a genius. I am not the one to be the best judge of that so we’ll let it go as a given. It just seems if we are going to arm teachers in preparation for any shoot-out at the OK Corral High School—well, we ought to do it in a way which will protect both teachers and students. I used to be a Professor and am not sure I would want to be the designated first target for Deranged Honschnivel from La La Land. It seems the most likely scenario here would be: BAM, the classroom door flies open and in a blink of an eye, what to our wondering eyes should appear, but Deranged Honschnivel firing his first shot in less time than our blink, at our teacher. “Okay, teacher is down and dead, the rest of you can now begin your scramble.” Oops the teacher is armed and will shoot Deranged Honschnivel. Really? It takes 1.19 seconds to draw a pistol from a Holster (Assuming there is no protective strap to be removed first), then .59 seconds to raise and fire a pistol. This in the best of situations like when one is waiting for the signal to do all this. My guess is that it would take at least a second for the teacher to realize what is happening. Deranged Honschnivel certainly already knows genius Donny T. has armed the teacher, so as soon as he breaks into the classroom he shoots the teacher first. So much for genius. More like the world of dumb and unhinged.
So, I think we need to design a miniature Sherman Tank and let the teacher teach from high above in the turret of the tank. But there is only one small problem here. Deranged Honschnivel and his growing army of clones would then realize the best place to take these kids down is when they are not in school. Like when school is over and certain streets are loaded with students walking home, or buses filled with students make their first stop to let a student off, or students are at a football game, or just playing a game in a league on a field or gymnasium, or at any number of sites for a prom, or maybe lined up at the Apple Store to get the newly released whatever, or….or…or whatever. It is not clear that kids have a preference as to where they get massacred.
So the President of the United States actually thinks arming teachers will put an end to mass student shootings. We made the planes pretty safe with all sorts of security measures, and terrorists just used used different scenarios. Perhaps geniuses can be naive, but current terroristic attacks with military style guns, homemade bombs, cars, and planes, are just scratching the surface of possible terroristic means at any place where people gather in suitable numbers.
Common sense (I know, hard to define this) seems to dictate that the more people armed, the greater the gun deaths will be. As for those other geniuses who recommend all students be trained in hand to hand combat, the kind of hand to hand combat untrained students have today in school when they fight is damaging enough to the participants. If all students get training in hand to hand combat, we now have created another harmful sport besides terrorism. This sounds like just a fairer, but no less dangerous game, than the knock-out game already in play now and then by adults, only now it would be taught to young kids.
Maybe we should try an approach that has more chance of success. Just write down the names of those advanced industrialized countries who have the least gun deaths. Then copy what they do because, it can’t hurt to try. Next, come to grips with another reality: we do not have a homogeneous society here in America, not ethnically, not by religious affiliation, not culturally, and have the widest discrepancy between the haves and the have nots. With essentially three large ethnic groups, none of whom are any longer a clear majority, either these groups learn to genuinely appreciate their diversity, and each group learn to help the other groups with their problems—or matters of safety for anyone will be a lost cause. It is no coincidence that those countries which score the highest in polls of individual happiness levels, are also the countries with the least gun violence. There does not seem to be an abundance of contentment in America right now. (“Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.”) Rene Dubos
Maybe we should concentrate, not on more missiles, smart bombs, military bases across the globe and begin to ensure that all our citizens have good medical care, good schools, good teachers, job opportunities with livable wages, good pensions, adequate vacation times, and safe neighborhoods. That’s the kind of environment which makes the most citizens contented. (“We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life with which we surround them,) Teddy Roosevelt
It is doable but not likely considering today’s toxic political environment, if we engage in capitalism that has adequate regulation to keep the playing fields level, and limits to prevent too much of our wealth from amassing in the hands of the top 2-5% of our citizens. Fair taxation is needed too. Contented citizens at all economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds do not create terroristic acts. That leaves the mentally and emotionally ill, and they need to be properly identified and receive adequate mental health support. Seems like a country which, with huge effort and focus, could get to the moon first, could tap the wealth being sequestered away by the top 2-5% of it’s citizens and use that that wealth to provide all its communities with means for them to be responsible, safe, and at least minimally prosperous citizens. Other countries manage, maybe we could catch up with them rather than engage countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc in which, over time, our own culture becomes more and more like theirs. Violence is a way of life in these countries too. Everything is about revenge, religious intolerance, ethnic hatred, with roving thugs taking turns controlling neighborhoods—much like many streets in our own nation which we would never meander around.
It will still be true that smart-asses who write endless musings as a public nuisance might still need a miniature Sherman Tank to ride around in for protection. I guess this sounds unpatriotic, but if we constantly demand “God Bless America”, then maybe we should start doing some things that deserve blessing—unless we mean that God is the cause of all these problems and should therefore correct them. “Oh what a terrible tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
The scariest part of all this gun debate is that we may have already gone too far with guns as a means of achieving results we personally, or as a group, desire. One side is hell bent on teaching certain other groups a lesson, and the other side, to varying degrees, sees the Golden Rule as the basis for achieving more positive results. I learned early on, teaching diverse college students, that the best way to disarm potential conflict is to be a friend. Any latent hostility melts away and it becomes a pleasure to work with them to achieve successes academically or with personal hurdles. (“Hard to dislike a chap who likes you, isn’t it? Well, there’s your peace plan.”) Unknown.
In the big picture, as long as human overpopulation continues, there is no hope for peace on our planet. Overpopulation always turns a species on each other as they compete for more and more precious natural resources.
Postscript: Here is a quick attempt to get a handle on expanding the happiness index in our country for all our citizens via an equation. Increasing the contentment level for all citizens = returning the income tax rates and estate taxes upon death to the levels of when Eisenhower was present + doing away with property taxes as the basis for funding education and have the Federal government give local school boards the same amount of money per student nationwide + doing away with most tax breaks, tax shelters, and work towards ‘this is your income and this is your tax +reduction of military budget and most foreign military bases, shifting all that money towards infrastructure repair, good education for all, good medical care for all, good pensions for all, livable wages for all, job opportunities for all, a 30 hour work week to replace the 40 hr work wk (so there will be jobs for all), plus a tariff on all goods produced abroad via slave wages (in other words we could only buy foreign goods if these goods were made by a livable wage for the country in question) + a foreign policy bereft of meddling with the internal affairs of other countries. Our good intentions have not panned out with any of our invasions or support for certain political groups in the Middle East, Africa, South America, and so on. This rushed equation needs a lot of tinkering, but we need to start somewhere to figure out how to maximize the happiness (I prefer contentment) level for all our citizens. When we can do this, violence will go down just as it has in countries which have already gone in these directions. Are changes too late? Maybe, maybe not. But at least we could try.
