Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

So the Texas State Legislature is considering a law allowing conceal and carry of firearms on the campuses of public schools. Faculty, students, administration, and staff would be eligible to conceal and carry.

If the law passes, I’m considering taking the license for myself, even though I have never owned a gun other than a twenty gauge shotgun. But that can’t be concealed. So I might as well carry a six shooter .38 revolver in my pocket.

Imagine a professor saying, “You better hand in that paper on time mo****fu***r—or else.” Unfortunately “Up against the wall” would be answered by “Stop telling me what to do, or else I’ll kill you like the worthless piece of s**t that you are.”

No doubt, this law will surely improve education. It will teach that one need not study texts which emphasize speech in a deliberate, albeit difficult, search for the good. Smith and Wesson will become more important than Plato.

You may say that those who hold conceal and carry licenses are already responsible, and that they would never commit crimes. But if that is the case then this law already has a bias in favor of ONLINE education—which is a non-education. Stay at home responsibly with one’s own guns and read Wikipedia. It beats the showdown at the OK Corral U. As a professor friend of mine says, “If you take online courses, you are not serious about education. So why should I be serious about teaching?”

Why not make it dumb for everyone online? Besides, there is an app for that anyway.

But administrators hope against hope that this total online education will be the case of the future of education. Then administrators will have true job security, and there will be no need for actual teachers. So they like the idea of everyone carrying guns, as long as those guns are held at home online and everything else educational is online too.

If you listen to the most fierce defenders of this law allowing everyone to conceal and carry, you would think that “the government” is one step removed from mass killings the likes of which were used by Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

But if you tried to find the actual law on the web page of the Texas legislature, you might be forgiven if you thought that Chauncey Gardener, Forrest Gump, or Jacques Clouseau were its framers.

That’s why I don’t have a link here. As Forrest Gump’s mother said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

You may make this issue what you will, but the so called “citizens” legislature which spends its time in Austin 24/7—365 makes laws for all of Texas. Try to figure this nonsense out at the Texas State Legislature’s page—let alone try to figure out their reasoning behind the law.

Nonetheless, I’m gonna stay at home and be a web page monitor—oops, I meant to say professor—of online education. Despite one’s responsibility, it beats being killer or killed.

Okay, I’ll keep teaching face to face, but after this law you must realize that that is a bulge, and while I will be as excited to teach as I ever was, that bulge is actually a gun, and I am not that happy to see you. Beware!

I only wish I were as excited about teaching without a gun as I am with one. You see, allowing guns in the classroom makes my thoughts perverted in a way that they never were.

Thanks Texas.

P.S. You may wonder about the psycho with a gun who kills many indiscriminately in school without remorse. Would my .38 ultimately save anyone? I wonder. What I do know is that education in its notion of pointing toward a way of life that is worth living is corrupted the more gun training is emphasized over “great book” learning.

But then I would never want to say that education in guns is not worthwhile.


Comments are visible to subscribers only. Log in or subscribe to join the conversation.

Tags

Loading...

Filter First Thoughts Posts

Related Articles