Shooting Gallery

Although not a sportsman, killer, or paranoid myself (well, perhaps . . .), I consider myself a second amendment man. At least so long as we live in this tyrannous, kleptomaniacal, natty oligarchy of ours, I find it awfully hard to sympathize with the crowd that thinks the government, of all entitites, ought to control my access to mah nine. Fainter hearts might, and the uniform fetishizers of left and right surely will, quail at this impolitic thought: when Joe O'SWAT-Team comes not-a-knockin', claiming my flush toilet or off-kilter screen door or purchase of cold medicine as evidence and probable cause of my Noriegatude, I feel that as an American citizen as much as any vice president I have an inalienable right to shoot the motherfucker in his face.

The broader gun-rights claim, for which I've always had sympathy, is that only an armed people can resist tyranny when it truly arrives. It used to be that my more liberal friends would sigh when I said this and give me a familiar song and dance: "Do you really believe that a bunch of guys with guns and grenades can resist the military of the United States?" Thanks to Iraq (and who ever thought I'd write such a phrase), I wouldn't hesitate to answer without pause if asked again: "Yes, I buh-leeve!" Of course, your average American, denuded of any identity worth defending other than that of a passive consumer, a person whose only contributive economic activity is the opposite of production, will take just about anything so long as they don't cut off his cable. But a man can dream . . .

All that aside, however, this has got to be some of the craziest bullshit I've ever read, and I do include everything else that Eugene Volokh has ever written in that estimation just to show how serious I am. Is this really the sort of public policy for which Volokh is going to advocate: allowing our nation's educators to go out in a blaze of glory on those off-chancey days when a well-armed lunatic strides through the schoolhouse doors? Why not simply fill the halls with trip-wired plastique and instruct the children to watch their step? In my own high school days, I had plenty of teachers about one multiple-choice failure away from going full-on Rambo themselves, so let's not kid ourselves that conceal-and-carry is the way to go with the put-upon crowd of educators in our post-educated times. I suppose Volokh would say that he's not arguing that we explicitly arm teachers as a matter of policy, but rather that we let them choose to bring a sidearm to school, though I wonder what then would be his excuse for denying the same right to a trained-and-licensed sixteen-year-old. I have no other point here, except to ask that the universe save us from the dim and well-intentioned.