Wandering around the web this week, I came across this weird little news story: School Officials Are No Fans of Gun Ban Signs.
It’s the tale of a school district in Illinois, where there’s apparently much lamenting and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the state suddenly being required to follow the federal law that allows the peasants to keep and bear arms. Apparently, the mere sight of a “no guns allowed” sticker will cause panic and alarm among the uninformed. Or so theorizes the reporter, who apparently worked hard to get some wonderfully tasty quotes for the story, including this one:
Supt. John Byrne agreed the sticker is “abrupt” when you first see it. “But I think it is probably less glaring to kids than to parents,” he said. “Kids are more aware of symbols and what they mean than older people might be.”
That got me thinking, but I ran out of words before I figured out how to say exactly what I wanted to say about this. Fortunately, a picture is worth a thousand …
The map is not the territory. 1
Notes:
- Thanks to friend and colleague Don Stahlnecker, who took my basic idea and made it beautiful! ↩
In Florida (and other states) they’re actually having to legislate against this kind of nonsense.
http://www.nraila.org/legislation/state-legislation/2014/2/a-return-to-sanity-lawmakers-push-back-against-zero-tolerance-abuses.aspx
I did agree with one statement in the article: “You can’t look at this (sticker) and not think about Sandy Hook,” she said
Yup. Sandy Hook and every other mass killing in a “gun-free” zone.
If those stickers are so traumatic, then wouldn’t the obvious solution be to leave the stickers off, and to encourage anyone who carries a gun, to keep it well hidden (so that it wouldn’t be “traumatic”)?
Of course, when one considers that we’re talking about Chicago, I have a feeling that many those poor little minds that they are afraid of being traumatized by seeing a silhouette of a gun, may have already been traumatized by gang violence (and not necessarily even gun violence) in some form or another…