‘But I’ll get shot for being late with my homework!’

Last year, my own Nevada state senator, Republican Bob Beers, proposed a law which would have "allowed" Nevada government-school teachers to carry concealed weapons on school grounds -- if they wished to do so -- after passing an arduous training course.

Needless to say, there was a public outcry, and not the outcry one would have expected if one were under the impression Nevada and America are still freedom-loving states with governments whose powers are limited by the written Constitution.

Since we must apparently spell everything out, slowly, what I mean is that the outcry should have been: "What? Teachers need some kind of special 'permission' to carry firearms, in a nation with a Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms 'shall not be infringed,' and an added 14th Amendment prohibiting local authorities from infringing those federal rights?"

If it had been me, I suspect a legislative decree ordering the immediate arrest of any administrator of any government building who made any effort to prevent otherwise law-abiding adults from walking in bearing pistols or Browning Automatic Rifles would have been more to the point.

Instead, Sen. Beers' modest proposal was met with howls of outrage and quickly laughed out of the building.

My favorites were the cogent letters mailed in by local schoolchildren -- am I the only one who suspects a little coaching by the schoolmarms? -- protesting, "No, no! Now the teacher will shoot me for being late with my homework!"

I was reminded of this when a reader wrote in, last week: "Dear Mr. Suprynowicz: Funny, you'd think that with all the press coverage of that terrible shooting at Northern Illinois University, there'd be some mention of the one the previous month."

The writer was referring to the two Palestinian terrorists, recently released from an Israeli prison, who on Jan. 25 infiltrated the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva in Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem.

The incident was reported in the Jerusalem Post of Jan. 26:

The day before, the daily paper reported, "Two terrorists ... armed with knives and a pistol, infiltrated the kibbutz -- in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc -- and sneaked into a building used by the high school, run by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz."

The kibbutz is surrounded by a fence, but the terrorists had been able to cut a hole through the fence undetected, a paramedic in Hatzallah Judea and Samaria told The Post.

"They entered a classroom where counselors were holding a meeting, and stabbed two of them," the Israeli newspaper reports.

Good heavens. And once the counselors were out of the way, how many students were massacred?

Oh, I'm sorry. Were you not paying attention? This was in Israel.

"Two of the counselors were armed and managed to overpower and kill the terrorists, without giving them a chance to fire their pistol," a Hatzallah spokesman said.

They plugged 'em.

The wounded teachers? They suffered "non-life-threatening injuries."

A little happier ending then in any of our own recent school attacks. And why? Come on, you can do it. The teachers in Israel are different ... how?

For some reason, no reports so far of any of the students of the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva in Kfar Etzion being shot by their teachers for failure to turn in their homework. But we'll keep our ears open.

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The Associated Press reported Feb. 16 Senate Republicans were protesting that "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is trying to protect the two leading Democrats for president by shielding them from a difficult vote on an issue that many rural voters consider crucial" -- a proposal, lodged in the current public lands bill, to restore the constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to carry their firearms in the national parks for self-defense, without having them unloaded and disassembled.

But why should the vote be "difficult"? Every candidate for national office who I've interviewed since 1994, regardless of party, has insisted, "I support the Second Amendment."

(Admittedly, my own congresswoman, cheerful gun-grabber Shelley Berkley, couldn't resist adding a few words of ridicule for my own stance that this means Americans have the right to bear nuclear weapons -- though she still can't seem to find the part of that amendment she "supports" which says "except for really big, intimidating weapons that we in Washington want to keep to ourselves.")

(The rhetorical trap the victim disarmament gang lay for us when they urge us to admit we don't "need" nuclear weapons, for those who have forgotten, is that they next get us to admit we don't "need" Abrams tanks, machine guns, or recoilless rifles. Pretty soon it turns out all we "need" is a non-functioning replica flintlock to carry in the Fourth of July parade. Don't be baited into switching to an argument about "needs" when the topic is "rights.")

Why shouldn't Sen. Reid just let Sens. Clinton and Obama -- and big-government nanny-stater John McCain, for that matter -- prove they mean what they say, by allowing them to vote to restore the vital constitutional right of Americans to bear self-defense weapons in government parks and forests, especially after all the recent murders of unarmed tourists in those enclaves -- by criminals curiously unaffected by these gun bans?

Because they're all lying, of course, and Harry knows it. The gun-grabbers live in terror of having to expose their real position on this issue, ever since Bill Clinton was forced to admit it was primarily his own party's radical, hoplophobic, gun-grabbing ways that managed to dump control of both houses of Congress into Republican hands in 1994.

Has no one else noticed the deafening silence from this entire gang in response to all the recent multiple shootings by wing-nuts who recently stopped taking their Prozac?

There's an obvious "code of silence" on calls for new gun controls ... which I predict will last until -- let me gaze into my crystal ball, here -- um ... late November 2008.

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A strange local fellow who advocates the death penalty for marijuana smokers keeps writing in to protest that Suprynowicz is "against sensable" gun control.

I certainly am against it -- even if you spell it "sensible." I'm also against "sensible Bible, book and newspaper control" (barred by the First Amendment) and "sensible chattel slavery" (barred by the 13th Amendment).

Why don't judges, politicians and Republicrats regularly try to convince me that, "Of course nothing in the 13th Amendment bars a certain reasonable amount of slavery; after all, nothing is absolute! Just as you can't yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, so is the government free to impose a reasonable amount of forced labor on the people"?

Or did I just describe the Internal Revenue Service?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/.