Via the GeekWithA.45, we have this from David Kopel. Money quote:
Our nation has too many people who are not only unwilling to learn how to protect themselves, but who are also determined to prevent innocent third persons from practicing active defense. A person has the right to choose to be a pacifist, but it is wrong to force everyone else to act like a pacifist. It is the policies of the pacifist-aggressives which have turned American schools into safe zones for mass murderers.
As they say, read the whole thing. My thoughts?
Well, first, I was left absolutely stunned by Kopel's revelation that "the armed 'school resource officer' refused to pursue the killers into the school." Maybe I had heard this before and the details just faded into memory, but something that at least a few of us have been saying ever since that day is that if there had been armed teachers there at Columbine, the tragedy could have been prevented...and there was someone there who was armed? I don't know...perhaps it's just as well that this detail was forgotten, because the clueless pundits and editorialists who roam the halls of American newsrooms would probably seize on it and hail it as proof that arming teachers or administrators is not the solution -- conveniently ignoring, as they so often do, the facts surrounding that revelation, namely that "Even after SWAT teams arrived, and while, via an open 911 line, the authorities knew that students were being methodically executed in the library, the police stood idle just a few yards outside the library." (emphasis mine --ed.)
Kopel goes on to discuss several other things, including the questionable utility of anti-bullying programs, and at least one benefit of them, namely that they encourage people to come forward and report problems. This could be a good thing in the big scheme of things, along with arming teachers and administrators, as it's an intermediate measure that could well rid the environment of someone who could cause mayhem later...but, of course, we still don't arm anyone on school grounds -- or, for that matter, teach kids and adults alike about the combat mindset -- and the results have been plain to see, although there have been encouraging signs of change in Texas and Utah. I fear, though, that yet more innocent people are going to be killed because of the pacifist-aggressives that David Kopel talks about...
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