Local radio personality Lars Larson published his "Thoughts on the Reynolds High School tragedy" a few days ago.
Lars, you jackass… The idea that taking discretion away from teachers on handling gun incidents and imposing intrusive random searches on students is somehow going to discourage mentally-ill people like the Reynolds shooter is just ridiculous. How would this have helped here? Or in any of the recent school shootings? In many of them, the shooter was an adult from outside the campus; even when this was not the case, all the shooter had to do was bring in guns on one particular day and do his thing. This mentally ill person would be what? Afraid of getting caught? Unable to get a gun onto campus for an hour?
What is a teacher with a gun supposed to do here? If the gun is safely secured, the shooter has plenty of time to kill before it can be brought to bear; in any case, there's plenty of places in a school to start shooting with no teacher nearby. If the gun is not safely secured, the teacher has just made it easy for a mentally ill person to get hold of a gun in school. And of course all this assumes a lack of mentally ill teachers. In any case, Lars, if the existing laws allow teachers with permits to carry guns, what are you asking Governor Kitzhaber to do? Force unwilling teachers to carry them?
Your attempt to do statistics at two removes is utter third-grade bullshit, Lars. I'm not going to argue with you about it. Just read the list of school shooting so far this decade at Wikipedia, and let it sink in. Try to match it with any other country in the world. Try to explain that these incidents aren't as bad as they look. Try.
By the way, Lars, why do you want to discount suicides by gun at school? You don't think those are dangerous to the other students? You think that the student in question would have "just committed suicide some other way"? Bad news: suicide by gun is by far the most successful method available; nothing else even comes close.
"We protect our paper money with guns." No we don't. I doubt even you do, Lars. Most adults in America carry around paper money every day, completely unarmed. How is this possible? (Hint: They leave the gun handling to trained and experienced professional gun handlers.) In any case, you can leave the obvious non sequiturs out of your hopeless little rants. They are just a distraction, and you knew it when you uttered them.
Why, Lars? Why do you want to issue statements like this? Because you have an audience and you know what makes them feel good. It's important to you to attack our Governor, because he's a Democrat, while your audience is a bunch of rabid Republican cultists who equate Democrat with Satanist. It's important to you to attack anybody who suggests anything about controlling weapons, because your audience of dumbass redneck gun-spraying wack jobs feel rightfully threatened by the idea that this country might decide to restrict access to guns to folks who can at least give some impression of being able to handle them responsibly.
You know what all that makes you, Lars? Evil. It makes you evil. I hope you can feel some tiny share of the responsibility for every school shooting going forward, because you have contributed in a tiny way to staving off folks that might help. But I doubt you'll feel anything, because I strongly suspect that you're a sociopath.
Unfortunately, you have an audience. Sucks to be the rest of us. (B)