SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking through a leafy, green park in the south suburbs of Chicago.
Turning a corner, he runs into three Chicago-area school administators: Hanna PFLUG-NICHOLS, Nicole PRYMM, and Morghaine EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS. They are standing astride the path.
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: Wait! You are Mitch Berg. You are one of those gun nuts.
BERG: Er, I’m a Second Amendment activist. I may or may not own or carry a firearm…
ALL THREE WOMEN: Aaaaaaaagh!
PRYMM: Don’t say it!
BERG: Say what?
PFLUG-NICHOLS: That word!
PRYMM: The “G” or “F” or “P” word.
BERG: Er…”gun?”
ALL THREE WOMEN: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: Why do you hate womynandchyldren?
BERG: Er, I’m sorry – but what brought this on?
PFLUG-NICHOLS: Um – because of the change in what we call “concealed killer” laws, we are being forced to put stickers on our schools.
BERG: You mean like this sticker here?:
ALL THREE WOMEN: Aaaaaaaaagh!
PRYMM: That…shape!
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: It looks like a Pop-tart!
BERG: Those are stickers that your new concealed carry law requires buildings to have at their entrances if it’s illegal to carry inside.
PFLUG-NICHOLS: It’s disgusting. To have theshapeof a…
PRYMM: …a…
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: …er…
BERG: Gun?
ALL THREE WOMEN: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
BERG: Look – Illinois put so many places off-limits to gun owners that it’s only fair that you warn them before they unwittingly become a felon.
PFLUG-NICHOLS: But theyshouldbe felons!
PRYMM: I think they should all be in jail
BERG: Be that as it may, they are two orders of magnitude more law-abiding than the general public, and they generally work pretty hard to stay that way. So why entrap them into a cheap arrest based on a technicality?
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: Because I hate them.
BERG: It’s a warning sticker.
PFLUG-NICHOLS: But it may cause people to think that since there’s a sticker saying that they can’t bring one into the school now, maybe they could have in the past?
BERG: You honestly expect school children to think that?
PRYMM: We expect what to think that?
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: Those little pseudo-people that are all over all our buildings.
PRYMM: Huh. Are you sure?
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: I think so.
BERG: Look – you are less likely to be wrongfully shot by a carry permit holder than you are to be hit by lightning.
PFLUG-NICHOLS: By what?
EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: Goddess-farts.
PFLUG-NICHOLS: Ah.
BERG: As in, 5-6 times as likely to be hit by, er, “goddess farts” as by a law-abiding citizen with a legal firearm (flinches, realizing his mistake)
ALL THREE WOMEN: Aaaaaaaaaagh!
BERG: Sorry….hey, I’m hungry…
(Pulls pop-tart from backpack. Chews it into the shape of a volume of Shakespeare.
PFLUG-NICHOLS: Dead white European male!
PRYMM: Fascist!
(And SCENE).
Good News: Tinley Park (IL) school officials show reluctance to comply with the mandate of having to post signs which prohibit firearms on their property in order to exclude guns from it.
Bad News: This is not because they support the lawful carrying of firearms on their property. It is because such signs, in order to be enforceable, display the frightening image of a firearm.
Several selected quotes from a Feb. 2, 2014 story in the Southtown Star (a local publication from the Chicago Sun-Times):
“While complying with state law isn’t a point of contention, some school administrators find the sticker’s image to be a bit alarming.”
“One of my biggest concerns as a principal is safety and security,” Tinley Park High School Principal Theresa Nolan said. “It is bothersome to have to post a sticker of a gun that says, ‘Hey, folks, leave your guns at home.’ ”
““I would have appreciated something more subtle, yet still recognizable — a logo, perhaps, not a gun,” she said.”
““You can’t look at this (sticker) and not think about Sandy Hook,” she said, referring to the 2012 school shooting in Newton, Conn., in which 20 children and six teachers were killed.”
Still, how seriously can you take a lady school administrator without a hyphenated surname …
If teachers in Tinley Park are afraid of the very picture of a gun, how exactly do they teach history?
For that matter, if the picture of a gun would suggest to students that it’s OK to take a pistol to school, maybe a refresher on “logic” would be worthwhile as well.
Even mentioning the picture of a gun is crossing the line.
Or even mentioning the mention of a picture an item that might be mistaken for a gun.
OK, comment number two; although Tinley Park is not exactly among the worst of suburbs in Chicago, if the image of a gun scares these teachers so much, I’m guessing they don’t read the Tribune or watch the 9 o’clock news on WGN, if you catch my drift. So we can probably excuse them being horribly uninformed…
Pflug-Nichols! HA!
If teachers in Tinley Park are afraid of the very picture of a gun, how exactly do they teach history?
Do you think they airbrush AK47 from Hezbollah flag when they teach kids how compassionate, tolerant and freedom-loving they are?