By Adam Sieff

The National Rifle Association is right: in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy, let’s give teachers a gun.
I mean, what harm could really come from that? If all our teachers had guns, Harvard-Westlake would be the safest high school in the country: who would want to go postal on a campus saturated with 9 mm Berettas anyway?

With all those guns, a nutjob with a pistol wouldn’t get any further than the classroom door before teach’ popped a cap in him. Call the janitor, end of story.

Besides, it’d sure make disciplining students a lot easier.  “For every day your term paper is late, I shoot off a finger. I’ll start with your pinky and work my way in. And no, they don’t grow back.”  Equipped with a .22 Derringer, Attendance Officer J. Gabriel Preciado wouldn’t have to worry about cur classes or excessive tardiness anymore either. How does that sound, Gabe?

We could even install machine gun turrets at the campus entrances to stop those pesky homeless invaders and car thieves from slipping past our $30,000 surveillance system and 24-hour patrol units. Can you say: “No more humiliation?”  

We might accidentally maim a student or two, but our friends at the NRA will surely help us fight off any silly lawsuits.  

Now, with all due respect to the brilliant minds at the NRA, this concept of mutually assured destruction is not new.

Fifty years ago, it was actually the principle behind the Cold War and hey, we won that, didn’t we?
Some folk say that arming our educators is a “bad idea.” They point to their fancy scientific “evidence” and “research” that shows how more guns in a given population almost always translates into more violence — well, duh!

Of course there’s going to be more violence when teachers take initiative and start firing at suspicious looking students.  You just can’t let some crazies slip between the cracks and shoot up the school — you have got to shoot them first and ask questions later!

I say we get started right away. When I show up to school tomorrow morning, I want to smell the kegs of gunpowder in Head of School Jeanne Huybrechts’ office wafting across campus.  I want to see cafeteria operator Thiak Lor wrapped in ammunition, toting his AK-47, guarding his Wolverine Den.

Because in the end, who wouldn’t feel safe knowing that Thiak is packing?

Sieff is head of the Policy Oversight Committee. He can be reached at: [email protected].