NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – This week the Tennessee House could pass a bill that would let teachers carry a concealed gun. The bill would allow staff members in private and public schools to carry if they do the required 40-hour training and get approved by authorities.
Monday, Melissa Alexander came to the Cordell Hull Building with her son, a Covenant School student, for a press conference about the bill.
“My son is sitting right here because he was protected by his teacher that day,” she pointed out.
Covenant School moms try to stall House bill to arm teachers (wsmv.com)
No lady, your son is sitting right here because people with guns and the willpower to use them showed up and put the asshole Audrey Hale down.
They read a statement from a Covenant School teacher to try and stop the bill before it passes the House.
“I simply cannot imagine how I could have pulled out a gun with 10 children underfoot and in my arms,” Alexander read from the statement.
The words are from a preschool teacher who watched 13 students in a small closet the day of the shooting.
If you cannot figure that one out, you have no business being a teacher. I bet she has a car and drives it every day, something a bit more complex than drawing a gun and pulling the trigger at somebody threatening the kids she claims to want safe. Yet, she sends an anonymous message seeking pity and support for not doing what was right.
I understand why more parents want to homeschool and they are 100% right.
interesting that you point out her driving a car. cars are far more dangerous than firearms. I point out cars when dealing with irrational fear of firearms. This whole “debate” is pure ignorance. she can’t imagine “pulling a gun surrounded by these “children””…… but she can witness them being slaughtered….
Indeed. Cars are not only more dangerous, they’re several orders of magnitude more complicated both in their construction and their operation.
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I’ve seen guns described as the original “point-and-click interface” devices. While that’s a bit of an exaggeration — they’re not quite as simple to use as a computer mouse — it’s not far off. It’s certainly simpler than driving a car, which depending on if it’s an automatic or a manual requires the use of three or four limbs working in tandem.
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Nah, IMO a gun is about as mechanically complex as the braking system on one wheel of a car, and about as complex to operate.
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And your last sentence would have been my candid response to her: “You say you can’t imagine pulling a gun surrounded by these children you say you want to protect. Can you imagine watching them be murdered in front of your eyes, and yourself along with them, and being helpless to do anything about it? I pray you never have to do either, but the choice you make now decides the options you have if it does happen. More to the point, by opposing this bill you’re presuming to force your choice on everyone else around you, too.”
These are the same people fighting tooth and nail to keep the manifesto from being released.
Telling, isn’t it?
The cult works only if there is a high level of ignorance, so they can fill in the blanks. I’m a physician, and I recently had a debate with a colleague who is a forensic pathologist who spouted all sorts of nonsense about AR-15s in her argument for banning them. They included the standard litany that:
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1) One shot will blow a man in half
2) You can shoot hundreds of rounds a minute
3) The power and recoil of an AR -15 is so intense that no woman could fire it
4) It is so powerful that there are no legitimate civilian uses and it should be considered a weapon of mass destruction.
5) Firearms are not practical for self-defense in the modern world
6) Small arms are useless for resistance against the government
7) A person is more likely to be harmed by their own gun than saved by it
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I’m not going to go through the rebuttals for all of this here, since I suspect it’s well known to folk who follow this blog. The point is that this is a person who is *supposed* to be professionally knowledgeable about firearm injuries who spouted this. It occurred to me that even medical education has abandoned objective truth in order to promote this kind of propaganda. And because it’s our institutions that are supposed to be teaching us that are doing this, we have a whole generation of people who accept it without question.
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The thing that struck me, though, was that when I provided hard data and scientific studies in response, they were all dismissed out of hand as being “outliers” or “biased,” even though there were no studies to promote her position. I realized that this truly is a *religion.* As such, “facts” don’t matter. The truth is transcendental, and any studies that contradict it are axiomatically flawed or can be explained away.
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I understand that, because that’s the way I am with my faith. As a theologically conservative Christian, I fundamentally don’t care about any “scientific” arguments against the existence of God. If they “prove” that God does not exist or show some crippling problem with my faith, I dismiss it. I know my faith, and any such information is either wrong or poorly understood. I’m convinced that “in the end” an explanation will arrive.
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As an example of how my faith overwhelms data on the ground, look at the Israel/Palestinian/Iranian/Lebanese conflict. As a conservative evangelical who adheres to “graft” theology rather than “replacement” theology regarding Israel, I have a faith-based opinion about God’s covenant with Israel and the obligations of Christians towards that. As such, I am obligated to support Israel as part of my faith. Because of that, within extraordinarily limits, I *don’t care* about issues on the ground. And, conversely, secular Progressives and Islamists are exactly the same, but in the opposite direction. In order to “solve” this problem, there has to be a solution that allows both sides to come to a *real* accommodation, or one side has to win utterly and the other has to be defeated utterly. The Biden solution of a slow simmering war is doomed.
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Gun control cultists are exactly like that. What that means is that discussions with them have to be based on their underlying value system — their functional religion. All the talk in the world about the practicalities of firearms are useless. This is why the uptick in violent crime and the destruction of personal safety in the cities is probably the best argument against gun control. At the end, these people believe they may not have a right to free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion, but they have an absolute and Gaia-given right to safety. And it’s why two particular lies of the gun control movement — that firearms are not useful for self defense and that one is more likely to be harmed by having a firearm that be protected — are the ones that need to be attacked the most. These are the arguments made against teaching gun safety in school and against arming teachers. If those two arguments can be soundly debunked in a way that convinces people of this secular faith, then the battle is won. If they can’t then the battle is lost.
Bravo.
Thanks. I also think that gun enthusiasts are our own worst enemies here. We spend hours arguing and discussing minutiae about technique, stance, calibers, blah, blah, blah. Someone completely ignorant about guns might easily think it’s all very complicated. But, in fact, it’s trivially easy to learn basic safety skills and basic shooting. It’s hard to become really good. It’s easy to become mediocre — and that’s usually good enough. We don’t emphasize that.
Excellent post Archer (as always) and hh465also hits the nail directly on the head. For more often than not, The Truth is posted here. Thank you to all for posting rational intelligent content.
I’d be sorely tempted to ask them ‘Just exactly how many autopsies have you performed on gunshot victims in your career?’
Gotta feeling they’re like a lot of the other ‘experts’ out there who may have a doctorate in astronomy, say, but here they are weighing in on a subject as ‘Doctor so and so,’ but they really have ZERO experience in what they are commenting about.
Like ‘Dr. Jill Bribeme,’ or like Sen John Kennedy taking apart the ‘ski bunny’ that was testifying as a so called ‘expert’ at the ‘climate hearings.’
The Covenant mom: “My son is sitting right here because he was protected by his teacher that day,” she pointed out.
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No, your son is sitting right there because Good Men With Guns responded quickly enough to put the goblin down before she found your son. The teacher had very little to do with that, and would have been near-zero help if the goblin had found them.
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The Covenant preschool teacher: “I simply cannot imagine how I could have pulled out a gun with 10 children underfoot and in my arms,” Alexander read from the statement.
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That’s fine. Nothing in the bill says you must carry a firearm. But you also don’t have to stand in the way of the 4th-6th grade teacher — whose students can follow verbal instructions to hide and cover their ears — who wants the ability to deal with goblins.
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And that’s a false argument against these bills that flat-out refuses to die. It’s not an “arming teachers” bill; it’s an “allowing teachers” bill. No iteration of this concept has ever required any teacher or administrator to carry a gun. Your school has no guns now, and depending on the faculty members, it might still have no guns after the bill passes and goes into effect.
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So if you don’t want to carry for any reason — maybe you don’t like guns, or you don’t feel comfortable, or you don’t feel safe, or whatever — then don’t carry one. Plain and simple. But please clear the path for anybody who IS comfortable and safe around firearms and WANTS to carry.
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That the proponents still allow it to be labelled as an “arming teachers” bill, despite the PR ramifications and without challenging that label, makes me think they’re only semi-serious about passing it.