Guns don’t kill people, teachers kill people…?
Have you ever read a Breitbart article? I hadn’t and I didn’t even need to before making what I would call an accurate assumption about their target audience, just by reading the top comment of each article posted to FaceBook. Breitbart is a right-wing news company and for someone who is very liberal in their political views, it was pretty painful to scroll down their facebook page.
The article that immediately caught my attention was titled Florida School Shooting: Time to Arm Teachers for Self-Defense and I couldn’t keep myself from groaning. The article details giving gun training to teachers and education administrators to protect themselves and the children from future school shootings. The author, AWR Hawkins, suggests that the two armed resource officers at the school are not enough and that even two teachers being armed could make a whole world of a difference. Here’s my favourite line: “Are they to press desks against their classroom doors and arm themselves with chalkboard erasers, books, or rulers?”, once again ignoring the problem.
The article is well-written, whoever wrote it has clearly been writing like this for a while. It was calm, it was collected and it presented an actual argument and if you ou might even see that he has a point before you snap back to reality where fighting guns with guns is the solution rather than just taking away the guns in the first place.
The author really knew how to work the reader and was very aware of their audience. They reference the terrible shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary school, questioning how many lives could’ve been saved if one or two teachers has been armed. To take everything to the next level, the author brings up the principal of Sandy Hook, Dawn Hochsprung (who courageously and fatally charged the shooter), and declares shame on every politician, city leader and administrator who had the power to put a gun in Hochsprung’s hands. And to put the cherry on top, Hawkins leaves us with this tidbit:calling it inhumane to NOT give teachers guns.
After the pain of reading through the article without wanting to scratch my eyeballs out and scream “whY DoNT YOU JUST TAKE AWAY THE GUN”, I got the pleasure of reading through the comments of the article where many republicans were putting in their two cents.
Believe it or not, people actually could agree that placing guns in the hands of teachers wasn’t a great idea, maybe the world isn’t so awful after all! Their alternate proposed solution, was hiring trained vets to put in schools instead (I take it back the world is a lost cause). There is not a liberal insight, so if angry democrats and gun supporters bother you/annoy you/frustrate you/anger you I do not recommend reading past this point unless you’re ready to get frustrated.
Here we have the three top comments. People have unanimously decided that vets in schools are the proper way to address this problem. I am slowly dying on the inside from the lack of acknowledgement that they are fighting the problem with the problem.
Here we have David. David started off really well and then he somehow managed to suggest something that would make it easier for people to access and keep legal guns on them AT ALL TIMES. DAVID, WHAT HAPPENED?
You’re right Michael. We aren’t in a civil war here in North America so WHY DOES THERE NEED TO BE GUNS AT ALL?
And to finish this all off, I leave you with my favourite comment of them all. Nothing about what the article was about, just a pure hatred for left socialists and democrats and our awful tendencies to cover up history and our efforts build slave empires run by the elitist! God save us all! (I may have gotten a little carried away with that last “god save us” but I’m not taking it back)
Why does is this article successful?? Honestly I think that the right wing side of politics is its own filter bubble, or at least that’s what I like to think. I don’t think I could happily live in a world where I knew people were 100% informed and still making bad choices. I was shocked to see that there were no opinions in the comments to this article as far as I scrolled, that didn’t take a pro-gun stance! No left-wing controversists at all! Breitbart and its authors know the audience they’re writing to and their audience seem to be the only ones who read the articles for the most part, and that’s why I think their articles are so well received.
If you’re still with me here, I’m going to leave this video right here, it was released in December 2012 and it turns out that not even celebrities can influence gun control.
