They Don't Trust Teachers To Mark Their Own Tests, But They Trust Them With Guns?

I don't get this - at all.

Oregon State Representative Dennis Richardson sent the following to three school superintendents on the day of the Sandy Hook shootings:

From: "Rep Richardson"
Subject: RE: Preventable Tragedy in Connecticut
Date: December 14, 2012 2:53:06 PM PST
To: [redacted]
[redacted]:
The Sandy Hook shootings are another heart breaking failure of school personnel to ensure the protection of innocent children and adults. Sadly, most of the deaths could have been prevented.
If I had been a teacher or the principal at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and if the school district did not preclude me from having access to a firearm, either by concealed carry or locked in my desk, most of the murdered children would still be alive, and the gunman would still be dead, and not by suicide.
When will our school officials open their eyes to the reality that law enforcement officers, in such instances as these, can respond only after the unfettered killings have occurred, and that our children's safety depends on having a number of well-trained school employees on every campus who are prepared to defend our children and save their lives?
Dennis Richardson

 Richardson has been a critic of teachers in the past, saying that they use students as "pawns" to garner higher salaries and concessions from the school district:

I cannot remain silent when surrogates for a teachers’ union encourage 100 Eagle Point High School (EPHS) students to break school rules, march off campus and stage a protest to “respect the teachers.” Such a stunt, implicitly intended to pressure the school district to accept the union’s final offer and avoid the strike that the union called, is despicable. Notwithstanding the misinformation given to the students, the impasse in collective bargaining has everything to do with money and power, and nothing to do with respecting the good teachers of EPHS. 

Eagle Point, a southern Oregon community of 8500, has become the most recent community facing the battle between public unions and public school districts. The dispute is over how limited tax resources should be spent, and after a year of collective bargaining negotiations, the teachers and classified workers at Eagle Point School District 9 are scheduled to walk out of the E.P. schools and strike.

...

In response, the unions call for a strike and focus on generating propaganda to coerce public agencies to cave under misinformed pressure from the media and public—even using children for union purposes. I’ve seen this done at the Capitol when young children were brought in to beg legislators to vote for higher allocations to the State K-12 Budget. Now we are seeing Eagle Point High School students being used as pawns for the teachers’ union. 

It is time for such antics to stop. The unions are all about maintaining power and getting concessions for their members—I understand that. Nevertheless, public agencies and school districts cannot just raise the price of their products or move production off-shore like businesses would to deal with escalating labor costs.

 

Interesting that Richardson apparently believes teachers are capable of filling their students' heads with "misinformation" about budget cuts and using students as "pawns" in a protest that he terms a "stunt," but he wants to arm them in the classroom too.

Weird.

I just don't understand this stuff.

For years now, we have been told by the media and politicians that teachers are greedy, incompetent idiots incapable of intrinsic motivation or pride in their jobs, but now some of these politicians want to start handing us guns and ammunition in order to keep our students safe.

I'm having a hard time getting around the contradiction in that - teachers fill their students' heads with misinformation and lies, they use their students as pawns, they're greedy sapheads, but boy, we ought to arm as many of them as we can so we can head off the next Sandy Hook.

If they think so badly of us, why would they want to arm us?