In the wake of the recent school shooting in Minnesota, we came across the following statement from NRA First Vice President, Sandra S. Froman. Apparently, she believes that we should make guns available to school teachers to combat potentially armed students. From Yahoo News:

"I'm not saying that that means every teacher should have a gun or not, but what I am saying is we need to look at all the options at what will truly protect the students," the NRA's first vice president, Sandra S. Froman, told The Associated Press.

Gun-control restrictions would not have prevented Jeff Weise, 16, from killing nine people and himself Monday at Red Lake High School near Bemidji, Minn., said Froman, an attorney expected next month to be elected president of the NRA, which claims 4 million members.

The presence of an unarmed guard at the school failed to stop the siege, she noted.

"No gun law, no policy that you could implement now or that was already implemented, I think, could possibly prevent someone so intent on destruction," she said. "I think everything's on the table as far as looking at what we need to do to make our schools safe for our students."

Well, she's got us there. Clearly no gun control procedures known to mankind could possibly have prevented this shooting in Minnesota. Or, wait, no...perhaps if there was some form of gun control proposal which would prevent a sixteen year old child from obtaining a gun so damned easily, that might have helped! Of course gun control could have prevented this, Sandra. If he couldn't get a hold of a gun, he may still have been angry and violent, but he would have been walking into that school angry and violent with a golf club instead of firearms.

Let's look at this case in particular, as reported by CNN:

FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael Tabman said Tuesday that 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather, 58-year-old Daryl Lussier, and his grandfather's 32-year-old girlfriend, Michelle Sigana, with a .22-caliber gun before driving to the school Monday.

...

He said authorities believe Weise stole his grandfather's police-issued pistol and a shotgun, as well as a gunbelt and vest. Authorities said he had three guns in all.

So, he started the day with a .22. At present, it sounds like no one knows how or where he got it, but it's reasonable to speculate that it was through illegal means since he's sixteen. Perhaps he got it from an adult who bought it legally. If that's the case, then maybe a comprehensive national registry for firearms would make such an adult think twice about giving a gun to someone else. The knowledge that any criminal activities would likely be traced back to the original owner could give even a moron a moment of pause. Maybe the adult in question would have been unable to buy the gun if an effective background check was mandatory before sale. Or perhaps he wouldn't have even gone to the store if he knew that he needed to pass a firearm licensing examination similar to the one he took to get his driver's license, complete with gun safety training. Of course, Jeff could have stolen the .22, in which case we'd say that tighter restrictions on storage of firearms might have prevented the theft.

As for the other two guns, he clearly got them from his grandfather, who was a police officer. Speaking from personal experience, the police officers that we know store their firearms in secure containers. This is even more critical for law officers who live with children. So again, perhaps mandating this kind of secure storage of firearms would have meant that Jeff only showed up with a single .22 instead of three guns including a shotgun.

Even if we believe Sandra's myopic assessment of the situation, we're not so sure that arming teachers is the smartest thing to do anyway. Some of them are pretty stupid as well, and clearly can't be trusted with firearms. And even if all teachers could be trusted, is an escalating arms race in our public schools really the direction in which we want to take the educational system?

The thing that most of these kids seem to have in common is that they are isolated, angry, and alone. They feel like outsiders in their school, and they take out those feelings in violent ways. We would argue that adding armed teachers into the mix would only serve to make the perceived isolation and anger even more intense, and we're not the only ones who think so. From the Washington Post:

"The point here is that young people don't just turn up at school and start pulling the trigger," said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, a Los Angeles area advocacy group. "It's important that school officials learn to recognize the warning signals."

The solution, Stephens said, is not "to turn schools into armed camps" but to "make them more welcoming" and encourage "a much closer partnership between teachers, local law enforcement and mental health professionals."

Wake up, Sandra. Maybe there are plenty of knuckle-dragging morons in the NRA who'll nod in glassy-eyed agreement with your illogical statement, but to the rest of us it's just incredibly misguided and self-serving rhetoric.

And this is the probable next president of the NRA?

Gun control is so obviously a good idea, you'd think there would be some country where crime actually declined after it was instituted or where crime increased when gun control was slackened.

We agree that the current gun control measures in place today (holistically) are not very effective. No argument there. However, we do not agree that the answer is the removal of gun control.

We're sure that we could find statistics that suggest that gun control works, and we're equally sure that we could find statistics that suggest that gun control is ineffective. That's the nature of and the problem with statistics.

However, if there was a single, homogeneous approach to gun control across the country that included a single national database, background checks, tighter restrictions on storage of firearms and penalties for leaving guns unsecured, and a firearm licensing examination similar to a driver's license exam complete with gun safety training, we believe that such a system would be beneficial. Of course we are starting in a hole with all of the unregistered guns in circulation today, but that certainly doesn't mean that the only option is to give up on gun control entirely.

All that said, we firmly reject the notion that arming teachers is a good idea. Whether gun control measures remain in place or not, that is not a good idea, as we discussed above.