TEACHERS WITH GUNS

February 23, 2018

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher,

101 Main Street #380

Huntington Beach, CA 92648

Dear Congressman,

Re: Teachers with guns

From our balcony, we look down over Laguna Beach High School. The football field is immaculate, green, and well lit both in the early morning and the evening. The track surrounding it is state-of-the-art. I imagine there could be no better place in the world for a young person to get an education. Those of them who are raised in this most privileged of areas are fortunate indeed.

And yet… we now know that this school, along with every other school in this most privileged of countries, is vulnerable to the kind of mayhem that we saw last week in Florida. It is appalling to think that virtually anyone, with little effort and few questions asked, can lay his (yes, unfortunately, almost always “his”) hands on the kind of lethal weaponry that is designed exclusively to kill and maim as many human beings as possible on the field of battle. It is appalling to reflect on how many have acquired them, and have brought them into schools like ours, and have used them to inflict death and injury on a scale that should be unimaginable.

I want to ask you, Congressman: do you stand behind the appallingly simplistic, ignorant and dangerous words of your president on this issue? With his childish notion that the problem will be (so easily!) solved by arming teachers? Or by “hardening” every “target”—which is to say, every school in the country? Will you, as does the president, capitulate to the self-serving edicts of the NRA, and parrot the despicable words we heard from its leader yesterday?

I ask this because I value the school in my neighborhood and the lives of the young people who arrive there every day—with the expectation of returning home at night. I value the education it provides, and the teachers who provide it. I expect you, my representative, to share those values and oppose every effort to diminish or besmirch them. I expect you, my representative, to do what is necessary to protect them. And in today’s world it appears that the very least that can be done is to remove weapons of war from the equation. Entirely. Unequivocally. Immediately.

I expect and demand nothing less of you, as my representative, than a ban on all assault rifles. For a start.

Respectfully,

Peter Clothier, Ph.D.