Should guns be allowed in schools?

Guns in School. In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech. Shootings, I’ve heard some discussion about what it will take to make our schools safe. One man suggested that we arm the students; others think that is just pure foolishness. So let’s consider the alternatives. The problem is that a student or students will decide to go on a killing spree. They arm themselves and appear at their school where the daily routine and emergency protocols are known to them. Then they randomly take the lives of others, staff and students, until law enforcement has arrived in sufficient numbers to close off any available exits. But this was not a hit and run, their own lives are the ones they take last. It would appear that they were suicidal from the start, and had no planes to try and get away. The problem may be that this person has lost all hope. It may be that they feel they are incapable of dealing with the world and all of its societal pressures. Is the kamikaze mission which ends in self-destruction a last ditch effort to be noticed or to ‘in effect’ impose their will on a world, even if only for a moment? Is this perhaps an attempt at grasping their moment in the lime-light, even if it is infamy and not fame? Regardless of the source of the disturbance, the fact is that the other students and faculty are facing down the barrel of a loose canon. A canon that has pre-meditated the death of as many people as they can access, and considers their own life forfeit from the start. There is no reasoning with this person. Pleading, begging, reasoning or counseling are a waste of time. They have a gun. You do not. For the moment they have the god-like power to choose who lives and who dies. You are their subjects. How do you respond to that? Preventative measures would have to be aimed at either figuring out what has spawned this phenomenon (addressing the differences of a modern education in contrast with how things were taught in past) or at early detection and identifying probable shooters to getting them into counseling. The outcome of such directions will invariably open up the rift between the secular and the sacred or it will expose the limitations of our current psychological practices. Neither of these are going to lead to a satisfactory result any time soon. Failing preventative methods leaves us with the situation of a student throwing lead at anything that moves. There can only be one answer to that. The sooner someone can throw lead back, the fewer lives this kamikaze is going to be able to take. Cameras will not stop someone from pulling a trigger, nor will ID badges, nor will uniforms, or metal detectors or any other form of ‘physical’ security. All these devices will do is increase the resemblance between our schools and our prisons. No student in a ‘free society’ wants or needs to be treated like they are in a prison! Plus it will have the undesirable effect of insuring our would-be shooters that no one inside can possibly shoot back. But what if that were taken away? What if they had no assurance that they were going to be able reign supreme, even if only for the ten to fifteen minuets it would take for officers to arrive? What if they had to deal with the very same fear that they are using to incite terror? What if the ‘terrorist’ had a reason to be terrified? That can only happen if students who are of age and who choose to do so, are permitted to exercise their right to self-protection, and ensure their ability to fight gun-fire with gun-fire by bearing arms sufficient to the need of self-preservation. Only then will a shooter have to fear being shot at. Their ‘subjects’ would have the same power as they do, and their god-like ability to pick and choose who lives and who dies would be stripped away from them. Making schools a safe place to live is not something anyone can do for them. Whether it is a campus or a foreign country, populating it with militia is not synonymous with providing security. You’d think that Americans would have learned this lesson by now. Security will only occur when the students or residence are enabled to defend themselves. When they are secure in the knowledge that they can deal anything life throws at them, then they will feel and be secure. No ‘system’ will ever give them that. And the reason is for this is simple. No system is fool-proof. Nor is this a perfect solution, but then this isn’t a perfect world. As long as there is the threat of yet another student going berserk, the best solution is the one that minimizes the damages.

Geo Caching

This is my first attempt at creating a geocahe. I used a large plastic flower pot. Cut the bottom off about 2.5 in. up and buried the top part up-side-down. The bottom piece forms a tight lid and the cement provides camaflage... Roadkill, my raccoon icon gives you some persecive of size and I use him in a lot of my pictures to 'stamp' them as genuinely mine. The site is in the review phase. If it is passed it will be up on the website www.geocaching.com under the name "Peace of Junk", but a friend of mine isn't sure if having the cache buried like this is going to be allowed. On one hand I did have to dig a hole, but on the good side, I am not making anyone dig in order to find it. So we will have to see what the reviewer thinks about it.

The Benz

Yea, this friend-of-the-familey has been amoung us for almost 30 years. It still has its original paint and interior, which means it is due some spurcing-up but dad rebuilt the engine and restored the running gear. I cleaned it up and installed a CD/AM/FM that really kicks! Almost everything is back in working order. There is an issue with the power door locks (minor fix) nor did I bother with A/C or Cruze-Control. I got everything else working again... I put it in the paper and online asking 4,000 but that is my 'best guess' as to what it is worth. So far I've had no calls on it at all.

End Times

Durring the time that Jesus walked upon this planet, the religious leaders of the day, the people, and the various special interest groups of that time, were all very missguided about what the saviour must do. They had the prophesies, they had thier ideas, and as it turned out, not one of them was right. Not one! Now we have the prophies of his "Second Coming" and the end of life on the planet as we now know it.. the End Times. We have religious learership too, and our leadership his thier ideas on how all this will come about. I could be wrong, but history has a way of playing out again and again. It occures to me that our main-stream idea's about the second-coming of the christ are probably about as accurate as were the ideas about his first arrival. If that so the the entire collection of books in the "Left Behind" series is fiction upon fiction upon fiction. I have done some random "events" posting on here thus far... but would anyone be interested in going "topical"? -Dan.

An E-mail I got about Bill snd Hillary

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 10:28 AM Subject: Fw: Fwd: Bill snd Hillary

Bill Clinton registers for the draft on September 08, 1964, accepting all contractual conditions of registering for the draft.

Selective Service Number 326 46 228.

Bill Clinton classified 2-S on November 17, 1964.

Bill Clinton reclassified 1-A on March 20, 1968.

Bill Clinton ordered to report for induction on July 28, 1969.

Bill Clinton refuses to report and is not inducted into the military.

Bill Clinton reclassified 1-D after enlisting in the United States Army Reserves on August 07, 1969, under authority of Col. E. Holmes.

Clinton signs enlistment papers and takes oath of enlistment.

Bill Clinton fails to report to his duty station at the University of Arkansas ROTC , September 1969.

Bill Clinton reclassified 1-A on October 30, 1969, as enlistment with Army Reserves is revoked by Colonel E. Holmes and Clinton now AWOL and subject to arrest under Public Law 90-40 (2)(a) registrant who has failed to report...remain liable for induction.'

Bill Clinton's birth date lottery number is 311, drawn December 1, 1969, but anyone who has already been ordered to report for induction is INELIGIBLE!

Bill Clinton runs for Congress (1974), while a fugitive from justice under Public Law 90-40.

Bill Clinton runs for Arkansas Attorney General (1976), while a fugitive from justice.

Bill Clinton receives pardon on January 21,1977, from President Carter.

Bill Clinton FIRST PARDONED FEDERAL FELON ever to serve as President of the United States .

All these facts come from Freedom of Information requests, public laws, and various books that have been published, and have not been refuted by Clinton .

After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, President Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

After the 1995 bombing in Saudi Arabia , which killed five U.S. military personnel; Clinton promised t hat those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

After the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia , which killed 19 and injured 200 U.S. military personnel; Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

After the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, which killed 224 and injured 5,000; Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

After the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 and injured 39 U.S. sailors; Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

Maybe if Clinton had kept those promises, an estimated 3,000 people in New York and Washington , DC that are now dead would be alive today.

AN INTERESTING QUESTION: This question was raised on a Philly radio call-in show. Without casting stones, it is a legitimate question.

There are two men, both extremely wealthy. One develops relatively cheap software and gives billions of dollars to charity.

The other sponsors terrorism. That being the case, why was it that the Clinton Administration spent more money chasing down Bill Gates over the eight years in office, than Osama bin Laden?

THINK ABOUT IT! It is a strange turn of events. Hillary gets $8 Million for her forth coming memoir. Bill gets about $12 Million for his memoir yet to be written. This from two people who spent 8 years being unable to Recall anything about past events while under oath.

Sincerely,

Cdr. Hamilton McWhorter USN (ret)

P.S. Please forward this to as many people as you can! We don't want this woman to even THINK of running for President

... and, why doesn't the press ever ask any questions about these things? Do you think they would hesitate for a second to ask about it if the Clintons were Conservative Republicans?

Long Over-due

Happy Easter! Yes, this is Easter Sunday. And wouldn't you know it, the April showers have already started. The weathermen say it will rain today until sometime after noon. So much for the morning egg-hunt-plans.

Pilar got up at 5AM to go to work. (This is why I'm up and finding some time to stop and blog). She has surgery tomorrow morning, and then a few days of R & R to re-coop. I have to hand it to Pilar, she is a trooper! She came home from 8 hours of work Saturday, and found me working around the yard. I pulled the trailer out and started loading it with trash that I need to haul off to the dump, so she came out and started collecting junk from the back yard too. Saturday was such a pretty day. I started out by washing the car, (this only a scant few hours before the rain unwashed it again, if you know about Idaho dirt, you know what I mean. Washing the car lead me to washing the oil off the driveway, which lead me to cleaning up a bit in the garage, which lead me to need the trailer to collect all the trash... and so it goes. I think they call this Adult ADD. It is difficult to finish one thing before you run into something else that needs doing, and then another, and another, and so on.

Well, on Saturdays I have the liberty to address house work, the other five days of the week (excluding Sundays) are reserved for homework of the college kind. I have made good progress with the Physics class, but I am still struggling with the math. Calculus II these days. Step by small incremental step I am getting this stuff, just no where near as fast as I should be able to learn it. It is discouraging on some levels, and hearting to know that some folk never get it. I suppose slow is better than not at all, but slow is causing the cost of learning all this stuff to go up... and that is not a good thing.

Saturdays have also become a day to do a bit of recreation. These days I have discovered Geocaching. This is a bit of a sport, only it is played with a GPS and all the common-since you can muster. Basically the game works like this: other people have hidden small plastic containers in various and random places. Inside the containers are a log-book, and nick-knacks for trade. You are given the coordinates of the location and possibly a hint or two. You use your GPS to guide you to the general location, and use your common sense to figure out where someone else might have hidden a small container in that area. All this is recorded on a web-site... geocaching.com. If you locate the cache, you write your name in the log book, and log the find on the web site. I have found 17 already, and was unable to find about half that many. Occasionally these caches are discovered by people who know nothing about the game, and so the cache is "stolen"... for that reason you have to use a bit of stealth when you find and re-hide a cache, so you don't cause anyone to become suspicious. That is the nuts and bolts of the game, but the really great part about it has nothing to do with plastic boxes, GPS technology or dollar store trinkets. The really great part is that people stash these things in some of the most scenic, unusual or off-beat places. You will be guided to some of the neatest locations... places you had no idea even existed... probably places very close to where you live. I like the caches that are just out of town the best. This summer I hope to be able to put a trip together and geocache all the locations in and around Silver City Idaho. There is so much history up there, but I have never had a road-map to find it all like I will with the GPS and numerous cache sites! I want to take a tent, a camera and rent a quad for the trip. Any body else up for a bit of adventure?

Stained glass. Back in my High-school daze, I had an art teacher that showed us how to make stained glass windows. My wife and children all enjoy some handi-crafts, and often is the time we would visit a hobby craft store. I would look for any sort of stained glass supplies, but I never found any. Well I messed around with 'stained-glass-paint' and made a design for a bit of window I have here in the office, but it never looked right to me. So I got the bug and started looking online. You can find anything online. Then I got curious, and pulled open the phone book. Believe it or not, we have a specialty stained-glass shop right here in Nampa! I was amazed! I bought three sheets of glass and went right to work. I have had a bit of trouble finding the right solder and soldering iron... a 100 to 150 watt iron is a tough find these days, and so is the traditional 60/40 solder. Building supplies used to stock it, but their stock is all the silver (lead free) junk now. When I get this project installed, I will put up some pictures.. on the photo blog.

For Sale. It was a longer project than I'd figured on, but I was at long last able to get the small blue Geo back on it's wheels. Naday is finally driving it, but not very happy about it. She never wanted to drive my Geo-Tracker either, but she became accustomed to it. At least it has the automatic. The Metro is a standard, and you'd think she was being tortured by that. She has not been easily coerced into learning how to drive a stick-shift! She even dubbed the car, "The Anti-Christ" because of how it has "treated" her. Any one else can get in it and drive it smoothly.... :-) Thank God I had the foresight to install a new clutch kit in it while I had it apart! But the additional car left me with two to drive, and some bills backing up. I need cash. So I started to sell the Tracker... but it is 4-wheel drive, seats four (just), and tows a trailer, not to mention, it has a cool (removable) hard top, and I can go convertible with it). The Mercedes-Benz is almost as good on fuel, but burns Diesel (which costs more at the pump these days), it seats five, and has a great stereo (installed by yours truly). It was a tough call, but after weighing out all the pro's and con's, I decided to sell the ol' Mercedes. It has been in the family since (gosh) I can't recall, It's a 1976, and Dad would have had to have bought it before we moved up here, so he bought it around 78 or 79 at the latest. Tina learned to drive in that car, and I took my date to the high-school prom in that car. Dad finally rebuilt the engine and turned it over to me about a year ago. I've had to do a bit of work on it myself. But most everything is working like it is supposed too... with the exceptions of non-essential air-conditioning and cruse control... options the car came with. I have it listed in the local paper coming out today as well as with three online classifieds. I hope to find it a good home with an auto-enthusiast.