Arms = Education

Let's face it, I'm a lucky man. I am lucky to live in a place where firearms are accepted and understood. Where I don't have to repeat myself and where most folks understand the value in a firearm.

Via SayUncle, we go to San Diego where some there are consumed with pants-shitting-hysteria that there is ROTC on the high school campus and that some of them have pellet rifle teams.

I believe every high school should have a rifle team. Guns are educational on many levels. Between the metal work and the stock work, there's a couple of years of good solid vocational training there. On another level, there is the lesson that something powerful can be used for good or evil and both are contained in the single item. It's purely the choice of the user as to how it's used. Another lesson might be that some actions cannot be undone. A bullet fired can't be recalled. Handling firearms teaches responsibility.

For others, the lessons might come from the science of ballistics, both internal and external. Recoil, trajectory, energy, these are all hard sciences with practical applications in science and industry.

Then, of course, there are the Humanities, where we could study the phobias and mental health of people who are afraid of a simple inanimate object. Hoplophobes, Jeff Cooper calls them. They're simply irrational and I think Hoplophobia should be considered a mental illness, treatable by medication or electric shock.

So, in one rifle (or shotgun, or pistol), we can study history, science, the humanities and vocational education. Anyone who says that firearms have no business in a high school is simply a nitwit.