Steady

I hope you are having a happy holiday season however you celebrate it. My niece and nephew are in town until Sunday(their parents flew back today), and it has been nice to celebrate Christmas with them and do a few things. Last night Dad and I treated my nephew and brother-in-law to a Timberwolves game and tomorrow afternoon younger Bro and I are taking the kids to see "The Hobbit." It should be a fun movie.

In the meantime, there's been lots of stuff happening in the gun control debate fight that I set aside in deference to Christmas. Now that that has passed it's time to get back into the fray.

Let's start with the furor over David Gregory and the 30-round, and illegal to possess in D.C., detachable magazine that he was waving around on last Sunday's "Meet the Press." I'll be upfront and admit that I don't like Gregory, in fact I can't stand him. As far as I'm concerned he could be the poster child for everything that is wrong with most of our mainstream news media today. He is arrogant, smug, hypocritical, intellectually dishonest, and diligently incurious about anything outside the approved narrative of his elite little bubble existence. But should he be prosecuted for waving around a stupid ammunition magazine?

I think the answer to that is very simple; He should be treated the exact same way that you or I, or any D.C. resident, would be treated by police and prosecutors if we were caught with an illegal detachable magazine. No more, no less.

That's snarky, but I bet it's also the stone cold truth.

Another point about Gregory that has been duly noted since Sunday; Gregory hammered on the effectiveness of armed police/guards/teachers in schools, yet his own kids go to a school with no less than 11 armed guards on the payroll(plus Secret Service for the Obama children). I guess it's pretty easy to get breezily negative about security options at other schools when your own kids are protected like that.

I have to say I don't get the freakout over Wayne LaPierre's press conference in general or his proposal for police/guards/CCW holders in schools in particular. I understand how people might disagree, I even disagree with a good chunk of what he said, but judging from some of the reactions you would think he was planning on breeding hellhounds in order to set them to roaming the corridors of every elementary school in America. I don't want to become just another name-caller, so let me just say that a fair number of people need to take a deep breath.

We had an armed cop on duty at the high school I went to in the late 1970s. Most of the time he could be found in the 1st floor hallway outside of the principal's office between class periods, casually chatting with students. Nobody thought anything about it. To my friends and I he was just a man to avoid after skipping study hall and "walking the dog*." Even today, according to a USA Today story, 30% of public schools have some kind of police presence during the week.

Mayor Bloomberg in New York City called LaPierre's view a "paranoid, dystopian vision," yet his own public school system employs 5,000 unarmed security agents and 200 armed police officers for its roughly 1,700 schools. What that shows is that the difference between Bloomberg's position and that of Wayne LaPierre and the NRA is one of scale, not principle. Guns in the right hands are already playing a role in protecting public school students, in New York City and across the nation.

What about the cost of putting an armed cop or guard in every school?. By some estimates that would cost $10 billion or more per year. By any measure that's a whole bunch of money, but it needs to be looked at in context. And that context, according to one site, is that government spending in the US at all levels for FY 2013 will be $426 billion for preschool through secondary public education. We can't find 2.3% of waste or lower priority spending in our education budgets to better protect our schools? Seriously?

What additional role guns should play in protecting schools and other public gathering places, if any, is a legitimate topic for discussion, not one that is "crazy" or "paranoid." Armed police are already in some schools(have been for some time) and it's not unaffordable to expand that even further if it is the right thing to do. 

And the right thing is still the goal here, isn't it? 

 *Our euphemism for smoking a little weed.