{"id":110100,"date":"2025-05-18T13:32:34","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T18:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=110100"},"modified":"2025-05-18T13:32:34","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T18:32:34","slug":"110100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=110100","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Guns are here to stay in US, that\u2019s an opportunity not a threat<\/a><\/p>\n

With yet another\u00a0school shooting<\/a>\u00a0in the news in April, the familiar rhetoric has made a reappearance nationally.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, President Donald Trump marked the occasion by bloviating about one short section of the Constitution while systematically flouting dozens of other sections. On the other, the usual gun-control forces are fundraising off the Florida State tragedy with yet another call for \u201ccommonsense\u201d gun regulation.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been here before, and we\u2019ll be here again, and we\u2019re getting nowhere. It\u2019s not where most Americans want to be with gun issues.<\/p>\n

As a school board member in Second Amendment-loving Pennsylvania, I see every month urgent, complex challenges connected to firearms that get less attention than shootings, but they\u2019re important, too.<\/p>\n

We encounter everything from parents\u2019 worries about the psychosocial impact of active shooter drills to how to deal with kids who bring toy guns to school (sometimes with blaze orange tips unlawfully removed). There are complicated finance and legal issues related to firearms. There are discussions of \u201chardening\u201d buildings as targets. There are security armories to maintain. All in all, forecasting and policy-making around issues of gun-related safety and crime are inescapable in K-12 education. I don\u2019t foresee that changing.<\/p>\n

Why? Because guns aren\u2019t going away. Four in 10 American adults live in a house with a gun, according to one recent\u00a0Pew survey<\/a>, and civilians own an estimated 380 million guns. We can\u2019t hide from such sobering data.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, positive community-building gun experiences are being sidelined. Public support for shooting sports and legal hunting have seen worrying declines. Despite two very active popular private shooting ranges in our school district near Bethlehem, for instance, our school\u2019s rifle team \u2014 a club that offered students of all ability levels a chance to learn about gun safety in a politically neutral environment \u2014 closed down years ago and sold off its rifles for lack of community support.<\/p>\n

Any resolve to teach beneficial, sustainable relationships with guns for sport doesn\u2019t seem to exist. It\u2019s easier to slap a SIG Sauer weapons maker sticker on the back of a back of a big pickup than to spend time teaching a high school kid to safely clear a chamber, clean a barrel, use a scope or handle a loaded rifle. We\u2019ve been discussing the process of resurrecting our school rifle team (using air rifles), and I\u2019m hopeful, but we\u2019ll be competing with the easy allure of \u201cCall of Duty\u201d and online cultures.<\/p>\n

Young Americans aren\u2019t getting the whole story when it comes to firearms and national history either, so they easily fall prey to steroid-fueled, hyper-masculine, action-movie narratives that grossly distort American identity.<\/p>\n

Even before the founding of our republic, Puritans in the Americas needed to protect themselves. From the moment Myles Standish stepped ashore in present day Massachusetts, in 1620, the idea of America was anointed in gunpowder and the unholy chimes of matchlock musket fire. You think Pete Hegseth is a mad Christian neo-fascist militant? You wouldn\u2019t like a hothead soldier of fortune like Standish, whose general rule was kill-first-make-peace-later. Our early settlers were fiercely fiercely protective of their homes, and for better and sometimes worse, this impulse remains part of the American DNA.<\/p>\n

A theme of community safety is huge in this country\u2019s gun history, too. As the the writer Charles E. Cobb once said about incomplete portrayals of the Black civil rights movement in the 1960s: \u201cOne important gap in the history \u2026 is the role of guns in the movement. I worked in the South, I lived with families in the South. There was never a family I stayed with that didn\u2019t have a gun. I know from personal experience and the experiences of others, that guns kept people alive, kept communities safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve forgotten that complex, social heritage. Instead of treating guns either as evil instruments of psychopathy, or glorifying them as extensions of an incomplete masculinity, we need to respect their place in American communities, and in our nation, for what they are: Extremely dangerous, essential and often fascinating tools of sport and defense with the deepest of roots in our history and culture.<\/p>\n

We can recognize the horror of mass shootings and do all we can to prevent them. There are many preventative actions we can take that don\u2019t involve Second Amendment infringement. But at the level of civic policy and education, this also means working to demystify firearms and remembering their positive contributions to American kinship and community empowerment. By doing so, we help prevent gun pathologies from taking root and give law-abiding gun owners the right to protect themselves.<\/p>\n

Guns aren\u2019t going away. The Second Amendment certainly isn\u2019t going away. It\u2019s time to see that as an opportunity, not a threat.<\/p>\n

This is a contributed opinion column. Bill Broun teaches writing at East Stroudsburg University<\/em>[Pennsylvania]. He is a school director for Saucon Valley School District. <\/em>[Hellerstown PA]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guns are here to stay in US, that\u2019s an opportunity not a threat With yet another\u00a0school shooting\u00a0in the news in April, the familiar rhetoric has made a reappearance nationally. On the one hand, President Donald Trump marked the occasion by bloviating about one short section of the Constitution while systematically flouting dozens of other sections. … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,24,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-rights","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110100"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110102,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110100\/revisions\/110102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}