A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of America Being Massacred in their Schools

The following is a guest essay by the author of our (relatively) popular "A Manifesto for the "Tea" Party (and other Right-thinking people)". Sorry, no prizes for guessing his true identity.

In the wake of the horrific mass murder at an elementary school in Connecticut the other day, I would like to take a leaf from the book of Jonathan Swift and offer a modest proposal for preventing such a tragedy from taking place again. Whenever something like this happens, you hear a lot of people going on about how there are too many guns in America and that’s why these things happen. No, I say! Sure, a person may be 40 times more likely to get shot in America than in Canada, England or Germany, but the real problem is not that there are too many guns, it’s that there aren’t enough! As the wonderful people at the NRA are always telling everyone, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Some argue that guns make it easier for people to kill people. Well, sure. That’s what’s so wonderful about them. I mean, just squeeze that trigger and bang! …sorry, I got a little carried away there. What I meant to say was, guns make it easier for people to kill the people who want to kill people. I mean, as all gun-lovers know, if you make it hard to buy guns, only the bad guys will have guns. Some might say that if guns were hard to buy, even the bad guys, whoever they might be (and they could be anybody!), would find it more difficult to get guns, but I’m sure they’d find a way to get them, and if we assume that then obviously we’ve got to protect ourselves.

Given the assumption that anyone dangerous will have a gun anyway, and the incontestable fact that gun ownership is sacred therefore the idea of making it hard to own a gun shouldn’t even be discussed, the answer is obviously not less guns, but more guns. Like defenders of gun rights have pointed out repeatedly in the past couple of years after every one of these shooting incidents (and it’s not like they happen all the time – I mean, what’s a few mass shootings a year anyway?), if someone at the scene had had a gun and been able to get off a shot, then the massacre could have been stopped. So what about in this particular case? Obviously, just having one or two armed security guards wouldn’t be enough, because the shooter might have gotten the drop on them or just slipped in through an unguarded door. Some of my fellow gun lovers have suggested that the solution is to arm the teachers. This would be a step in the right direction (and how cool it would be for all our elementary teachers to have guns on them!), but there would be still be a risk that a gunman coming into a classroom might catch the teacher by surprise and shoot the teacher and a lot of kids before another teacher could come to the rescue. Basically, if only one other person has a gun, a massacre might still take place. Ah! But what if the students had had guns too?

The only way to be sure that no shooter is ever in a situation where he’s the only one with a gun is to make sure everyone has a gun. Right now there are only around 88 guns for every 100 people, and since some of us have more than one, there are obviously still a lot of people who don’t have any. More guns will make everyone safer, so we should make sure every single person has a gun. And how can we do that? Simple! Issue a gun at birth to every newborn child! Sure, they won’t be able to use it at first. But as soon as they can be taught to hold it properly, they should take it everywhere they go. So if some nut charges into a kindergarten hoping to get into the news by killing a bunch of kids, they’ll all be able to open fire on him and take him out! There might be a few stray bullets that hit other kids, but at least the overall death toll will probably be lower than if the gunman has the only gun. If we arm the kids, no one will dare pull a stunt like this one again!

Though arming children is the core of my proposal, another thing we have to do is get rid of any and all bans on different types of guns. First of all, when the omniscient, infallible Founders were writing the Second Amendment, they weren’t just talking muskets. They clearly had things like Glock pistols and Bushmaster assault rifles in mind, and we know for sure (because we know they must have thought the same as us about these things; after all, how could anyone we admire like the Founders possibly have thought differently from us?) that they wouldn’t have wanted the government to restrict them in any way. Secondly, we can’t take the chance that some nut, robber or home intruder might have better firepower than us. I mean, a lot of the perpetrators in the more notorious recent incidents have had Glocks and such. Of course these sorts of weapons are absolutely necessary. After all, who knows when you’ll have your home invaded by an army of intruders or you’ll have to fight off the powerful armed forces of the United Nations trying to impose world socialism on us? That’s what their real purpose is, you know. The UN is a sinister…ahem, sorry, got off track there. Anyway, obviously people need to be able to buy guns that can fire off a dozen quick shots without a need to reload. We certainly can’t let a situation arise where some lunatic has a semi-automatic rifle with a high capacity magazine and the people around him only have cheap pistols. Everyone has to be encouraged to get the best guns money can buy, so they’ll never be outgunned by the bad guys. Perhaps the kindergarteners should be restricted to smaller guns…but no, let them learn how to handle the big ones early. They can practice by hunting. Do you know what a semi-automatic assault rifle can do to a duck or a squirrel? You haven’t lived until you’ve blown some small animal to…er, sorry, another little tangent there. But anyway, semi-automatic weapons with high capacity magazines for everyone.

Some anti-gun people will say that guns are more dangerous to their owners and their friends and families than they are to any possible bad guys. They’ll point to statistics that say a gun kept at home is far more likely to shoot someone in the household by accident or in an act of suicide than it is to be used against an intruder. They’ll point to stories like the recent one about a guy who was putting his gun in his truck when it went off and killed his 7-year-old son. Sure, this sort of thing may happen on occasion, just as soldiers get killed by friendly fire. But anyway, like some guy I saw on the comment board for a news article along those lines so nicely put it, if a gun goes off and kills someone’s kid, they can just have another kid. Survival of the fittest and all that. If careless people shoot themselves or their families, that’s too bad for them. And it's not like having a lot of weapons around will make it more likely that someone's mentally disturbed family member is going to get hold of them and run amok. Whatever would make anyone think that? But anyway, if all the sane people have guns, including kids as I have suggested, the occasional loose cannon will get shot down before he kills too many people. In the final analysis, a few more losers committing suicide, some accidental deaths here and there and even the occasional mass shooting are a small price to pay to be able to own such a wonderful, exciting thing as a gun. Remember, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, so get yourself and your children guns and be ready to shoot down the other guy before he does it to you.

An interesting proposal indeed. Well, as at least one Republican congressman (Louie Gohmert of, you guessed it, Texas!) has already suggested that elementary school teachers should be armed, no doubt he or someone like him will consider pushing this idea. For another tongue in cheek look at the gun issue, check out this (and also the original).

Forty Years in Earth’s Gravity Well

On December 14, 1972, Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan climbed into their lunar module and lifted off from the surface of the Moon, rejoining Apollo 17 command module pilot Ron Evans in lunar orbit before embarking on their journey back to Earth. Since that day forty years ago, though many people have gone into space, no human being has left low Earth orbit. This is very unfortunate, and something that I hope will change soon, as I have remarked before. Though the Moon is in orbit around Earth, it is essentially outside Earth’s gravity well, in that a rocket capable of getting to the Moon would also be capable of going to places beyond the Moon. But while we have launched robot probes to various places in the Solar System, we have not launched humans out of Earth’s gravity well since the end of the Apollo program.

As I noted in my post on the death of Neil Armstrong, only a dozen human beings have walked on the Moon, and another dozen who went to the Moon without landing on it. These men (all of them were European-American males, true, but the lack of diversity was not their fault) are the only people to have left low Earth orbit or to have seen the Earth from a distance, as a small object in space (even from the space station it fills half the view). While most people are only familiar with Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, and maybe his Apollo 11 colleague and second man on the Moon Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, all of the astronauts who went to the Moon deserve recognition for their achievements and for their unique experience. Other than Apollo 11’s Armstrong and Aldrin and Apollo 17’s Cernan and Schmitt, the other people to walk on the moon were Pete Conrad and Alan Bean of Apollo 12, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14, David Scott and James Irwin of Apollo 15 and John Young and Charles Duke of Apollo 16. Those who went to the Moon without landing on it include the crew of the missions Apollo 8 (the first humans to go to and orbit the Moon), Apollo 10 (which also orbited the Moon and included later moon-walkers Young and Cernan), the aborted Apollo 13 (which passed around the Moon after the explosion that nearly cost the astronauts their lives) and the command module pilots for the missions that involved landings. In addition to Apollo 17’s Evans, they were Jim Lovell (Apollos 8 and 13), Frank Borman (Apollo 8), Bill Anders (Apollo 8), Tom Stafford (Apollo 10), Michael Collins (Apollo 11), Dick Gordon (Apollo 12), Jack Swigert (Apollo 13), Fred Haise (Apollo 13), Stu Roosa (Apollo 14), Al Worden (Apollo 15), and Ken Mattingly (Apollo 16).

Of course all of these men are quite elderly; those that are still alive, that is. Moon-walkers Armstrong, Conrad, Shepard and Irwin have died, as have Swigert, Roosa and Evans. Of the 17 men still living who have been to the Moon, the youngest are Schmitt and Duke, who are 77. Many of the others are now in their early 80s. Even if many of them end up living unusually long lives, it seems improbable that more than a few, if any, of them will still be alive two decades from now. So unless things change fairly soon, it’s possible that a day will come when there is no one living who has been to the Moon or even out of Earth’s gravity well. Such a sign of stagnation in humankind’s exploration of space would truly be regrettable.

There is still debate about what NASA’s medium-term and long-range goals should be, particularly where it should attempt to go first. One possibility that has been floated recently is building a space station at the Earth-Moon L2 point, the gravitationally-stable Lagrangian point beyond the far side of the Moon, a location from which spacefarers can operate robotic probes on the surface of the Moon and engage in radio astronomy, among other things. This is an intriguing idea, as is the idea of sending humans to an asteroid, back to the Moon, or perhaps best of all to Mars. The problem is that NASA has not received the funding to vigorously pursue any of these goals, and while private space ventures are making great progress, most of the really long-range journeys will probably require government involvement, at least for the next few decades. The exaggerated hysteria over the so-called “fiscal cliff” makes immediate prospects for increased funding for NASA remote. Still, while it is sometimes hard to be optimistic, I hope that by the time the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17’s lift off from the Moon comes around, humans will be preparing to go back there or on to another distant destination like an asteroid or Mars.