If the Hells Angels have softened somewhat, others are toughening up—and we bless them for it. A school district in Erie, Pennsylvania, faced with the increasing frequency of school shootings, has passed out baseball bats to its teachers. That strikes us as a neat compromise between, on the one hand, cowering in unarmed fear and, on the other, arming teachers and administrators with firearms. The latter is of course favored by President Trump, but extremely unlikely to become policy any time soon.
True, the weapons aren’t full-length; they’re the 16-inch souvenir-style bats. But these can be wielded in one hand more easily and accurately—we wouldn’t want to be whacked by one.
District officials insist they’re not handing out the weapons for wanton use; they’re strictly for emergent situations. “The bats are more symbolic than anything,” the district superintendent says. “However, we want to have one consistent tool to have at somebody’s disposal in a classroom in the event they have to fight.”
We agree entirely. Arming teachers with handguns creates more problems than it solves—liability in the event of stolen guns, the enormous cost of buying and distributing so many firearms, and so on. Mid-sized bats, on the other hand, are comparatively cheap, less apt to hurt the wrong person, and capable of serious nonlethal damage to an assailant.
Another official, the president of the local education association, makes an equally valid point: “It’s to make people comfortable with the idea that they can attack and not simply go into hard lockdown and just hide.” We recall the 2015 Thalys train en route from Amsterdam to Paris in which a Frenchman, a Briton, and an American confronted and subdued a rifle-wielding terrorist. Before that, the passengers on Flight 93 decided to act rather than do nothing. In both cases, many lives were saved.
The Erie school officials are right: As the writer of Ecclesiastes didn’t quite say, there’s a time to hide and a time to fight.
