Just to be clear, not a single character from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia should ever, EVER have anything to do with school security. The current state of affairs in which schools have been likened to war zones has had everyone up in arms and looking for a scapegoat when it comes to who’s to blame for the current troubles that have been experienced. But on the other side of the coin it’s also made people a bit crazy when thinking of ways to stop the violence and deter those that might think about coming to school loaded for bear and ready to treat the hallways like a level of Doom.
Arming the teachers seems like a poor idea since many schools can barely afford the materials they do have, while hiring on extra staff is just as absurd since if the schools can’t stretch their budget for firearms, how in the world are they going to afford more personnel? Plus, who’s to say that hiring on any more people, whether they’re veterans or police officers or those that know proper gun safety, will end in success? The mental screening process that would be necessary for such a position would be just as important as the act of keeping the school safe, so that those assigned to protect the hallways couldn’t become more of a liability than they might be to begin with. The paranoia that is gripping the nation is still fresh and it’s still spawning ideas that are being taken seriously by some and parodied by others. While this episode obviously came before the current shooting that’s gained the nation’s attention, it still strikes a great point as to why we don’t need armed thugs hanging around the schools.
Now granted, those who would be selected for such positions would no doubt be required to be clean cut and professional in their appearance, but they’d still be packing and they’d still no doubt be trained to react with lethal precision if need be. It would be a deterrent for sure, but it would be an admittance that people are now living in fear and accepting it as well. That kind of message isn’t something that needs to be spread across the nation. The fear that people will send their kids to school and never see them come home is horrible, and in many ways it’s abhorrent enough to take drastic measures that will insure it never happens. But it’s also a denial of the hope that things can get better without actively making them worse.
More than anything two guys like these shown in the clip are not what a school needs, but thanks to the comical nature of the show you can guess that such a thing would never, EVER, happen. American schools definitely need some form of protection, but perhaps we should be focusing on the students rather than the security measures at this point. Paying attention to the actual problem might be preferable to trying to guarding against the fallout.
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