I suppose I should applaud the fact that it is a suggestion for a solution and not simply thoughts and prayers. Sean Hannity, America's Mouth, believes he has a way to keep everyone safe: Surround them. “Every school,” he said. “Secure the perimeter of those schools. Equip them with retired police and military, they should be on every floor of every school.” Sean suggests these folks could volunteer for fifteen hours a week in exchange for paying no federal or state income taxes.
But Sean, what about shopping malls? Courthouses and the like? “We can do that with stores. We can do that in malls. We can do that pretty much anywhere the public is,” Hannity said. “Courthouses, we can expand that out everywhere and keep Americans safe.”
And if you're wondering how many retired police and military that might take, the math turns out to be in the hundreds of thousands. Seven or eight hundred thousand. Approximately the number of sworn full-time law enforcement officers currently on duty. So, as soon as they retire, we've got the thing staffed.
One thing though: Would you feel more safe, surrounded by armed guards. Or less? Me, I'm going to have to go with less. Like when I went for a stroll through Super Bowl City when it landed in San Francisco a few years ago. Like forty mass shootings ago. Heavily armed and armored presence did not instill me with Super Bowls full of confidence. What were they expecting to happen, with all those machine guns around? Was somebody trying to abscond with the Lombardi Trophy for goodness sake?
Nope. Just there to keep us safe. Which is weird because the way people who are insecure about having their guns taken away react is almost always to suggest adding more guns to the equation. Guns in the hands of loyal agents of the government, but never mind that most Republicans are not usually gung-ho about having big government looking over our shoulder. Unless it means we don't have to give up our machine guns.
So, to recap: Thanks Sean for your input. The chances of getting that many well-trained gunmen to deal with the gunmen who wish they had a job where they could be well-trained gunmen seem pretty slim, but we really appreciate you being so solution-oriented. Demented and sad, but solution-oriented.
Sheesh.
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