The Price of What We’ve Chosen
To The Editor:
The Preamble of our Constitution begins with this: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…insure domestic Tranquility…promote the general Welfare…” In light of present conditions, however, it looks like this was little more than a statement of good intentions, intentions that have gone badly awry as grieving parents in Uvalde and across the country will testify. We might wonder why it’s turned out this way but since large numbers of our fellow citizens adamantly reject the idea of national selfexamination—preferring to ban books and censor teaching—we’ll have a hard time figuring it out. In light of that, we can at least say out loud what has become apparent — We the people have formed a union that churns out an astonishing number of violent, angry men and then arms them for working out their grievances. It is no accident that we have arrived at this condition. And we appear accepting that this is just the price of being the people we’ve chosen or allowed ourselves to become. So if we won’t act to change, let us at least acknowledge who we are.
One small suggestion arises from ideas that are becoming prevalent as defense strategies, for instance these: Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post (4 June, 2022) believes reluctantly that it’s time to arm teachers—“… the idea of an armed teacher is obscene. I don’t disagree. It is obscene. But when a Twitter follower wrote to me recently saying that arming teachers would be the end of civilization, I replied, ‘We’re already there, my friend.’ What could be less civilized than a society that tolerates regular massacres of its citizens, especially of its children?”
Our local County Judge, concerned about safety in the workplace, recommends: “… from panic buttons to single points of entry—locks, cameras, radios, hiring people for a permanent presence—all of those things.” He calls on the county Emergency Management Chief to step up his efforts and is assured by him that additional active shooter training will be conducted in churches and schools. He adds also the prospect of “…on-site police officers… armed teachers…a School Marshall Program [using] retired military…” The Chief tells us that “Statistics show that these mass shootings stop the second a good person with a gun shows up.” (The Fayette County Record, 31 May 2022). I’d like to see the source of those statistics; the evidence from Uvalde, where dozens of good people with guns stood around for over an hour while the killing proceeded, is not exactly convincing, and from what I see the evidence against the notion of guns as the cure for guns is overwhelming.
The suggestion is: If this is what it has come to then let’s accept it and arm as many as we can in as many places as we want, even become a sort of armed camp if it makes us feel safer, but can we at the same time try to figure out why it’s come to this, why so many American young men are so desperately alienated and violent, why we are so willing to arm them as readily as we now prepare to arm teachers. Could we work toward actually becoming “a more perfect Union?” If we don’t change the trajectory we’re on, where will this story end?
Craig Brestrup
La Grange