Essentially if the school safety levy fails for the combined efforts of Fairfield schools, Hamilton, New Miami, Edgewood, and Monroe—Hamilton will vote to allow teachers to arm themselves. And the other school boards will have to follow because doing nothing simply isn’t an option. Out of Butler County, Ohio’s 10 school districts five of them are looking for this safety levy to hire more employees to keep the school boards from having to make a hard decision on how best to protect schools. At the core of the argument especially among young and inexperienced parents who have been taught all their lives that guns are bad, school boards are trying to appease them with a more centralized process. This involves spending millions of dollars on additional resource officers, mental health assessments and similar employee staffing increases which of course cost more money. Yet we know now from experience that the real solution is a more decentralized process where teachers can act as first responders the moment a crisis breaks out. And the good thing about that approach is that it doesn’t cost more money.

At the heart of the problem is that the basic assumption about public education is that it should not involve guns—because the aim of the progressive education philosophy is to live in a world where guns aren’t needed, value judgments are surrendered to equal rights and the people being educated are subjects of the state. Guns do not fit that view of the world. But in no way is that vision aligned with life in the real world, it’s an idea that mostly people who think politically left of center strive for. Most parents enroll their children in a school without thinking about politics or danger, because their primary concern is that their child is safe, and they want to believe that the schools themselves are free of any turmoil. School boards love to spend money, because its easy and when collections of people are in charge of administering finances, spending money is the only real way to get along because everyone loves to spend money, especially if it is other people’s money. So this issue is particularly challenging for school board members. The only way to make panicky parents happy is to give them more safety personnel, mental health specialists, social workers and counselors—because buying those types of employees give people the illusion of safety. It gives parents the feeling that the institution itself can keep their children safe, and as school board members yielding to that fantasy is safe in itself, until there is a real problem and a deranged shooter comes into the hallways that none of the new government employees could see coming.

Many of the gun rampages we have seen just this year, not to mention year’s past involved people who were considered mentally deranged in some form or another and the institutions of our society proved they were completely ineffective to stop such people from acting in a deadly way. To stop such a deranged mass murderer before the act occurs requires a decision based on judgments, and this is something that our modern institutions just don’t do, because they are so politically charged. Our modern institutions for which public schools are a part are more prone to trying to make a deranged lunatic feel more at home by attacking the normal kids into unnatural acts of compassion than in removing the threat from society by implementing a judgment that might seem unfair. So public schools are powerless to protect children from those who decide life isn’t worth living and they take to becoming mass murderers. By their reasoning, if they are going to kill themselves anyway, why not take a few people who made them feel terrible along the way pay too.

All the methods of implementing school safety as proposed by the Butler County safety levy is to deal with the aftermath of a mass shooting, not to prevent it from happening, and that is what needs to be clear about what people are voting for. There is only one way to ensure that a mass killer doesn’t gain an advantage over a student population of unarmed kids is to have teachers be the first responders to end the threat seconds after it has started, instead of minutes. That is the only way to properly protect students in a school from deranged killers which are becoming more common place these days from many influences. This idea that guns will be legislated out of existence is simply another liberal fantasy that they haven’t come to terms with yet. Guns are part of American life and children should learn to live with them, how to properly use them and what function they serve in the context of society. For instance, a serious course of study could be made of how the invention of gunpowder has changed the nature of human existence politically. Americans are living proof of that evolution, but the path to the political philosophy which created that American experiment is confirmation that no human society will retreat back into the compliance of a communist state, which as China is now and the Soviet Union used to be. Once people have tasted personal freedom, there is no way to erase it from their minds and over the last thousand years mankind has marched toward more personal freedom and much less aristocracy. Yet that is not what schools are teaching and that is also what makes them dangerous—because they are not aligned with the world around them.

For many the history of firearms and the nature of why people love them isn’t relevant to this discussion of school safety, but unfortunately for those utopian minded liberals, such an understanding is mandated for resolution on the safety issue. Is the security of a school more effective if it is more centrally controlled, or is it more effective if it is decentralized? The obvious answer of course is decentralization, we know that from lots of experience as a society. Guns are a part of world culture, they were invented out of human necessity to protect individual rights and that is why history says they are here to stay. We aren’t going to “uninvent” them. Therefore, to have a safe society we have to have a means to defend ourselves from people who may use them for malice and especially in education institutions, such instruction and awareness is paramount for tomorrow’s next generations. To defend them from harm, guns must be part of the solution, not mental health specialists, social workers, and counselors. Those are investments into what happens after a tragedy. We want to solve such problems before they become deadly.

Parents and teachers who are not comfortable with guns are going to have to adapt. Their sensitivities cannot be the contributing factors to making schools less safe due to their emotional condition toward guns. For those people I would suggest some classes on firearms, and to learn more about them aside from what they have seen in Hollywood productions over the last twenty years. Guns themselves are not dangerous, they are precision instruments which defend individual rights. If a teacher is responsible for the safety of a classroom and a crazed gunman is outside their door looking to commit mass murder against harmless, innocent people, that teacher should have the ability to end the threat right then and there. There won’t be time to call the police. A counselor or mental health specialist won’t stop a killer in the hall and talk them out of committing violence, only equal or superior firepower can do that. And that is the way of things in a free society—decentralized first responders who can slow down or stop a threat until the professionals arrive, just like in CPR. The only thing stopping this safety measure from being implemented for the good of everyone is the sensitivities of those who insist that guns not be part of a solution that only guns can solve. And not just guns, but guns in the hands of everyday people who are on the front lines and most prepared to take action when threats arise.

For many, obviously the case with the school boards of the participating schools, the responsibility for such security in their minds fall on the professionals we hire in society to deal with these kinds of things. But it is that over-reliance on institutional safety that many of these mass killers exploit to instigate their wrath. Guns are not a particularly American idea, but the personal use of them is, which means that in order to have a properly safe society that is living in harmony with the invention of guns, that personal participation of guns is something we should use to solve the gun violence problem. The solution is in decentralization within our institutions so to make them safer. More centralization will give us the opposite, the likelihood of more violence. If we really want to solve the problem of mass shootings, especially in public schools, and especially in Butler County which is the focus of this unique tax increase for the five-schools mentioned, then we need to allow teachers to be that layer of security. Throwing more money at more centralized control will do nothing but waste money, which the school boards participating in this horrendous tax and spend approach should have already had in their budgets to begin with. Ultimately what the school boards are asking for in this levy request is for Butler County voters to bail them out of having to make a hard decision—whether or not to cut some expenses out of their budget to hire more safety personnel, which is what they should be doing. Or in having to make a decision in arming teachers which would hurt the sensibilities of some neurotic parents who need an education of their own to get up to speed with the modern world. But nothing about the Butler County safety levy will make schools safer from a potential shooter who might want to attack schools and the children within it.

If I had loved ones in these schools, which I personally do, and a lunatic comes to that school with a gun to shoot up the innocent, I expect a teacher or administrator to be carrying a gun and to stop that situation before mass carnage occurs. There isn’t time to call for help when something like that happens. The situation must be dealt with right then and there. I don’t need a counselor to talk me through the grieving process after a bunch of kids have been killed. I don’t need a mental health professional to rationalize the mind of the killer before the smoke has left the scene of the crime. I just need the threat neutralized and that loved one home safe every day. And just having teachers carrying guns concealed during their professional business makes the chances of a safe day at school much more of a reality.
Vote not only NO on the Butler County Safety Levy, but………………………….HELL NO!

Rich Hoffman

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