The state of Texas, ever the testing ground for horrendously bad policy, has in one of its school districts decided to allow teachers to carry guns in the classroom.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080815/ts_nm/texas_guns_dc
Texas school district to let teachers carry guns
Fri Aug 15, 3:32 PM ET
HOUSTON (Reuters) – A Texas school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district’s superintendent said on Friday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.
The board of the small rural Harrold Independent School District unanimously approved the plan and parents have not objected, said the district’s superintendent, David Thweatt.
School experts backed Thweatt’s claim that Harrold, a system of about 110 students 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth, may be the first to let teachers bring guns to the classroom.
Thweatt said it is a matter of safety.
“We have a lock-down situation, we have cameras, but the question we had to answer is, ‘What if somebody gets in? What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s just common sense.”
Teachers who wish to bring guns will have to be certified to carry a concealed handgun in Texas and get crisis training and permission from school officials, he said.
Recent school shootings in the United States have prompted some calls for school officials to allow students and teachers to carry legally concealed weapons into classrooms.
The U.S. Congress once barred guns at schools nationwide, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck the law down, although state and local communities could adopt their own laws. Texas bars guns at schools without the school’s permission.
(Reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio; writing by Bruce Nichols in Houston, editing by Vicki Allen)
Here’s an accompanying link courtesy of SmirkingChimp.com:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/16482
Nearly any time we put on any kind of public event, the NRA would send its hired-gun “PR firm,” the Mercury Group, to stake out our press conferences, report releases, or fundraisers with their camerapeople. And just like Bill O’Reilly’s ambush producers, they would try and disrupt the event by shouting leading questions based on studies from their favorite researchers. Quite often they would yell things like, “Considering John Lott’s study that the availability of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens reduces crime, why do you . . . ?” And then the president of our organization, at the time a savvy guy named Bob Walker, would have to sidetrack the issue at hand in order to point out how Lott’s studies had been discredited by legitimate academic researchers, and that, as Matt Bai of Newsweek once wrote, Lott had “been shown the door at some of the nation’s finest schools.”
After a TV appearance, Lott once chased my immediate boss down a hallway, shouting at her that she’d have “blood on her hands.” He has been famously exposed as his own sock-puppet. He logged onto Amazon.com under a pseudonym, “Mary Rosh,” and gave his own books five-star ratings, claiming that Lott was “the best professor I ever had.” But what do you expect from a guy who has published articles that claim that crime goes up when there are more black officers on a city police force, and that allowing teachers to carry concealed handguns in schools will deter school shootings?
How much do you want to bet that the Harrold Independent School District based its decision in large part on the basis of Lott’s deceptive and unsubstantiated claims? Here’s another bit from the Smirking Chimp column:
You see, no matter how much the NRA spends each election season to tilt the scales, or how many politicians whose offices it can “work right out of” (as it said about Bush in 2000), all it takes is one loon with a lot of firepower, and the NRA retreats back inside its bunker and offers “no comment.”
When 58-year-old Jim Adkisson got tired of all the liberals he felt were taking away jobs and wrecking society, he allegedly loaded up with 76 shells and a shotgun he bought at a pawnshop and headed for a liberal Unitarian church in Knoxville, Tenn., to shoot it up. It’s the sort of crime the NRA, months from now, will argue that could be prevented “if you let law-abiding citizens carry guns to church.” I’m sure even Mary Rosh would agree.
Anyone care to disagree?