War on Stupidity

“ONLY THE TRULY IGNORANT”

by Gunnery Sergeant John McClain, USMC, Retired, ©2013, blogging at Gulf1

(Mar. 13, 2013) — We have come to a point in our Nation where the genuine, can’t find the top of their heads with both hands stupid people seem to outnumber rational thinkers.  Today, I read an op-ed piece where a six year old student was suspended for two days because at snack time, he, in his own words “tried to make his breakfast pastry look like a mountain”, but it turned out to look like a gun, “I knew I was in trouble when the teacher saw it”, was comment from the boy.

The school was shut down, the father called at work and told his son was suspended for two days, and the boy’s creative eating was defined as “inappropriate eating”, clear and obvious, as it caused the shut down of school, and no doubt, angst for dozens of adults, bewilderment for hundreds of kids, and one hopes thousands of kids wondering if aliens had landed, and stolen the brains of all the adults.

In recent months, a boy was suspended for pretending to throw an imaginary grenade, another boy was suspended for making his hand into a gun and “shooting someone,” a five year old girl was suspended for a pink pistol in her backpack which spewed soap bubbles, clearly a serious danger.

We are led to believe there is a horrendous outburst of unheard-of gun violence that has arrived, and the future of our world is at stake over this sudden change.  If this were a third-world nation, where the vast majority of people, adults and children were in fact illiterate, schools completely absent, and history something passed word of mouth, it might be excusable, however those same freaks who have done these suspensions will suggest we are among the best educated in the world.

If this is true, why are all our children not being taught that Hitler used the several school shootings which took place while he was mere “chancellor,” to call and get mandatory gun registration, which allowed him as Fuhrer, to disarm Germany and bring on the “Holocaust”?

Why aren’t we being reminded of the hundreds of mass shootings which have taken place in the past century in America, each because someone had an irrational grievance and went someplace they knew they would not face guns, and took out their angst on total innocents?

I hear of such idiocy, and my first thought is “these people are so far removed from reality they don’t know that pastry gun is unloaded, they really believe if he pulled the trigger part of the pop-tart, it would fire.”  I have to wonder, when was the last time most kids in general were put in the position to actually see a real gun, touch it, feel it, do something which could actually make a difference, learning, for instance.

I married my wife and her two children in 1984, my son was eight, my daughter five, and they got their first taste of “The Corps,” as we shipped out to Hawaii.  I took Roger and Melissa out to the authorized range, and taught them to shoot.

I took them out with an 1862 Colt Navy revolver, one you had to pour powder into the cylinder, put a ball on top, then ram it down in, and load each of the six chambers that way.  I’d had them practice at home before, so they got it pretty easily.  Then you have to put a copper cap on each of six nipples, crimping each so it will stay on.

After they had each fired a dozen shots at the paper target, I set up the half a dozen melons we bought at the market.  Both of them made good hits on their first and subsequent shots.  There was never any question that someone shot did not just get up like on T.V., they never ever played with guns, and are adults with a healthy respect because they have knowledge.

It is only the truly ignorant who are the real danger in this issue.  While evil exists in this world, those good must have the means to resist at least equal to that which evil has access to.  Edmund Burke has always proven right, “evil prevails only because good men do nothing.”  Teaching arms, as all the founders stated a necessity, is our sole security.  It is obvious there is no “security” in the teachings of school.