Despite schools being a favorite target of mass-murders, one teacher’s fight to take her gun to school appears to be a loosing battle:
MEDFORD, Ore. – High school English teacher Shirley Katz insists she needs to take her pistol with her to work because she fears her ex-husband could show up and try to harm her. She’s also worried about a Columbine-style attack.
But Katz’s district has barred teachers from bringing guns to school, so she is challenging the ban as unlawful, since Oregon is among states that allow people with a permit to carry concealed weapons into public buildings.
“This is primarily about my Second Amendment right and Oregon law and the simple fact that I know it is my right to carry that gun,” said Katz, 44, sitting at the kitchen table of her home outside this city of 74,000.
“I have that (concealed weapons) permit. I refuse to let my ex-husband bully me. And I am not going to let the school board bully me, either.”
In an eerily similar fashion to what Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said about students being able to feel safe on their “gun-free campus” a year before it became the theater for the worst school-shooting massacre in U.S. history, Superintendent Phil Long insisted employees and students are safer without guns on campus at South Medford High School, where Katz teaches. The district plans to make that argument when the case comes before a judge on Thursday.
Katz won’t say whether she has ever taken her 9 mm Glock pistol to school, but she practices with it regularly and has thought about what she would do if she had to confront a gunman. She would be sure students were locked in nearby offices out of the line of fire, and she would be ready with her pistol.
“Our safety plan at our school now is that if somebody threatening comes in, you try to avoid eye contact, and do whatever they say, and that is not acceptable anymore,” she said. Shootings at Virginia Tech University and the one-room Amish school in Pennsylvania, “reinforced my belief we have to take action, we can’t just acquiesce as we have been taught to do.”
But the school board and superintendents are unlikely to respond to such rationalism and will instead allow everyone at the high school to remain lambs waiting for the slaughter.
UPDATE: Hopefully this story will get a lot of attention. Michelle Malkin just posed her comments on the case.