Got yourself a gun

As a teacher, it is our duty and responsibility to protect children - that are not our own as if they were - from the forces outside our school. But, these past few weeks, we all needed a little extra protection.

March is supposed to be a happy month. The snow has melted (at least from last weekend’s storm), the weather is breaking and the sounds of Spring are in the air:
birds chirping, grass and flowers growing, rain falling and…bullets flying.
Sunday, March 8, Pastor Fred Winters of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois is shot and killed at the 8 a.m. service by a gunman with a .45-caliber gun. Three days later, a gunman rattles two towns (Samson and Geneva in Alabama) when he kills 10 and – on the same day, in a separate incident across the Atlantic – a student walks into his former school in Winnenden, Germany shooting at pupils and teachers killing 15. And the day before yesterday in Carthage, North Carolina a man – with no affiliations to Pinelake Health and Rehabilitation Center – kills eight and wounds three before he is injured trading shots with officers.
The sad thing is, these are just three shootings that happen to make the headlines. A spin on an old proverb: If a gun goes off in the inner city and no news cameras or reporters are around, does it make a sound?
We have a problem.

Everybody is talking about gun control. Got to control the guns…No, I think we need some bullet control. I think every bullet should cost five thousand dollars. Know why? Because if a bullet cost $5000 there'd be no more innocent by-standers…And people’d think before they shot someone.

-Chris Rock, Bigger & Blacker

The problem is not that guns are too easy to acquire; the problem is that bullets are not hard enough to get. If people keep clinging to their guns and religion - as a long as those guns stay as empty as the false hopes the Republican Party was promising - America will be a much safer place.
The issue of gun control in America is a bigger metaphor of this government’s attitude toward leading by example to discouraging countries from nuclear proliferation.

There's an arms race, like I'm runnin' on my hands/

A dance marathon on my napalms and/

Drop mine's first so that they bombs can't/

and glocks, lasers, missles beat rocks, paper, scissors/

I built mine's big, better build yours bigger/

Built mine's quick so I could kill yours quicker/

The number one supplier, the world's largest equipper

The second smallest dyer, best non-coexister/

I pledge allegiance to gasoline and bulletproof limousines and leans on the property of the poor/

And every night, I pray to the Lords of War, every manna,

a Mac-11/

Now all good child rebel soldiers go to AK47 heaven/

And a landmine in every playground that they step in/

And Youtube the footage from the camera on the tips of our bullets

And record like forum on Darfur…push it.

- Fallout Boy ft. Lupe Fiasco – Arms Race (Remix)

If you didn’t catch it all the first time, read it again “so you can plainly see the black man pain I (Lupe Fiasco) campaign 'bout/God willing 'fore I wane, I take a champion route/Before I throw a bout (give in to the Coolness of mass media)/I'll walk out the game (leave on my own terms) while my fans in the stands is chanting my name out, Lu-pe...Lu-pe...Lu-pe..."