Our local gunshop is a couple miles from our home, down the street from the local elementary school, in the same parking lot with the post office, and next to the pre-school. Here is what it looks like:

Yup. Those are AK-47s. I’m pretty sure. Assault rifles. Weapons made for the purpose of killing a lot of people in a very short time. Being sold in a building down the street from a school. Sharing a parking lot with a government building.  Next door to a pre-school.

And… does this strike anyone else as COMPLETELY INSANE?!!!

Here’s what it says on the gun shop’s webpage: “All American Armory is offering discount pricing to persons of faith wishing to purchase firearms to protect themselves and their families. This includes Handguns, Self Defense Shotguns, and AR’s.”

Assault rifles were designed to kill mass amounts of people in a very short time. What the heck are the “faithful” people of my community preparing for?!  Is there some zombie invasion here that no one has bothered to tell me about? When did my neighborhood suddenly become a war zone?

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I have heard people say that teachers should be armed to protect their students from intruders. And… well… there’s an idea, for sure. Of course, shooting a gun is not like in the movies where you just point and shoot and the bad guy drops. In real life there is “collateral damage” – innocent people sometimes have an annoying tendency to get in the way of the bullets – and, in a school full of teachers armed with guns, the “collateral damage” would be school children. And even if a teacher is an expert shooter she’d have to actually have the gun on her person to be effective against an unexpected intruder, intent on murder.So, yeah – let’s make sure our teachers are walking around their classrooms with the guns holstered to their waists or shoulders for easy access. This will surely give our nation’s kindy-garteners a nice cozy feeling in their first year in school.

Of course, if the intruder is wearing body-proof armor – which is often the case – a little handgun is not going to be a very effective weapon against a man in a bullet-proof vest. So maybe we should arm our teachers with AK-47’s, also. An AK-47 might be a little bulky for a teacher to strap to her waist, but maybe she could carry her AR around in her left hand, while she holds her whiteboard marker in her right. And maybe we should wrap up all our students and teachers in bullet-proof vests like the bad guys to make it all more fair – maybe we should add bullet-proof vests to our students’ school supply lists?

Yeah. That’s the kind of world I want to live in, for sure.

In case anyone’s interested there were two more school shootings yesterday.