I very much enjoyed Andy Morris-Friedman’s guest column Thursday [Gazette, “The price of freedom?”], in which he maintains that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a bigger gun — that’s just common sense — but I don’t think he goes far enough.
It’s not so much the size of the gun (though who doesn’t enjoy really big guns?) as the number of them. When I read a headline saying 20 or 30 defenseless schoolchildren have been shot in a classroom, the word that jumps out at me is defenseless. We obviously need more guns in schools to stop guns in schools, but it can’t just mean arming the teacher — we need to arm the children, too.
The 2nd Amendment doesn’t just kick in when we turn 18 — the Founding Fathers meant it to apply to all of us. None of the potential mass shooters I know would dream of entering a classroom if they knew 30 or 40 kids (and this is where increased class sizes is a bonus) were going to drop them in a hail of gunfire.
I am not one of those crazy gun-nuts, but I am a parent. It should be done age-appropriately. Middle and high schoolers are (as we know) capable of wielding AR-15s, but elementary school kids should be issued only handguns, and kids third grade and lower should carry knives or machetes, lest they feel left out and their self-esteem should suffer. And no pink handles for the girls — this isn’t a Barbie movie.
As much as it would please Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, we can’t do away with schools altogether, but we can make them places where our kids can study and play and learn, and feel safe, knowing they can blow away anyone who bothers them, whether it’s a mass shooter or a schoolyard bully or just that girl who didn’t invite you to her birthday party.
Only when all our kids are packing can we hope to have a truly level playing field.
Peter Nelson
Northampton