“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…” – isn’t that what the Bible says?
Yesterday, the NRA broke its quite understandable, even welcome, silence following the news out of Newtown last week. More guns, they suggested, would prevent more gun violence. Armed guards at school, they opined, would heighten everyone’s sense of security.
Yesterday, I dropped my son at school early. In the parking lot were two police cruisers. When I took my daughter over a little later, I reminded her that the administration had promised a more visible police presence at the school, and not to worry.
Actually, they spent most of the afternoon in sub-lockdown state, so she worried anyway.
But while I am glad that the police station is a minute from the school, and that the city is committed to the safety of our children, and while I am most grateful to our first responders for their responses, I have to tell you that the young people I know do not consider more armed guards, more “good guy guns,” more bullets in their vicinity to be any guarantee of safety. On the contrary, when they see this level of “security,” they are more afraid. They understand that the more we expect violence of one another, the more we expect to meet violence with violence, the more we rely on death to save lives, the further we move away from peaceable coexistence, from safety, from the common good.
From the mouths of babes and sucklings…