Once Again, We See The Unreasonable Nature Of Anti-Gunners

Shortly after the Constitution was ratified, our Founding Fathers set to work on something else. They figured that as good as the Constitution was, it still left a few things up for grabs. They wanted to preserve a few key rights, civil liberties that they believed were essential for our nation’s future.

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Among those are the right to free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press, to name a few.

Called “The Bill of Rights,” these first ten amendments solidified our liberties and freedoms that are not granted by the government but by our very nature has free people.

Another of those liberties was the right to keep and bear arms.

Yet we’re constantly bombarded by people who think we’re somehow out of line to refuse to give up our sacred liberties. People like this opinion writer:

I led my first mass shooting drill in January 2013, a month after the horrific Sandy Hook massacre. My colleagues and I spent hours developing plans. Was it better to escape or to shelter in place or to fight back with the blocks and tennis balls a police captain had advised we have on hand? Which students might freeze? Which might run? My classroom was less than 10 seconds from the school’s entrance. What could that mean?

“Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over,” British journalist Dan Hodges tweeted, citing Sandy Hook. Indeed, as I installed blackout curtains and introduced my students to our designated hiding space (bring a book to read silently, word directions carefully so no one’s alarmed, present the drill as a game), I waited for legislative change that never came.

During the 2017-18 year, there has been, on average, a school shooting every single week of the year. While guns-rights advocates have come up with an appalling list of anti-solutions, what they’re unwilling to do is have a productive conversation on gun reform. As the eighth graders at St. Cornelius, let alone the students of Parkland, Santa Fe and other communities can attest, those of us responsible for protecting students have failed.

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Now, those “anti-solutions” include allowing teachers to be armed so they can defend themselves with more than blocks and tennis balls, as this woman says she was told to do. It also includes hardening our schools, making it easier to defend them, and including a different alarm so teachers and students will know not to respond as they would to a fire, thus giving a shooter a more target-rich environment.

Yeah, complete non-solutions.

The writer here is trying to paint us as unreasonable, yet she’s the one who is refusing to have any conversation that doesn’t ultimately give her exactly what she wants. Further, what she wants is nothing less than an infringement on our civil liberties, and yet we’re the unreasonable ones?

I wonder how she would have reacted, in the immediate aftermath of something like San Bernadino, if people had started calling for the restriction of Islam. I’m sure she would have responded with citations of the First Amendment, arguing that people have a right to practice whatever faith they so choose and the government has no power to stop that.

If the response to the attempted car bombing in New York City several years ago had been mandatory vehicle inspections, I’m sure she would have cited the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

In both of those cases, she’d have been right.

But now that the right is one she doesn’t personally like, she’s ready to attack it. She’s trying to paint those who want to defend our civil liberties as somehow being unreasonable.

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Meanwhile, she’s the one pushing the radical agenda and refusing to discuss anything other than her radical agenda. She’s not interested in solutions. She’s interested in restricting guns. She doesn’t care if there are other options out there. That much is clear based on her description as “non-solutions.”

Tell me, who is being unreasonable?

No, we’re not interested in giving up our civil rights. Any of them. But we’re willing to try and find other solutions because no one wants to see dead kids.

The fact that she, as a teacher, is unwilling to engage in even that conversation makes me wonder about that whole “no one” part, though.

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