Idiot “meme”/sign of the day:
A “Pulitzer”?! Puh-leaze…
Whoever made that sign just went full-blown retard.
Okay, first of all, the right to bear peanut butter doesn’t appear in our Constitution. Second, aren’t schools already “gun-free zones”? Meaning, kids are already restricted from bringing loaded guns to school? Hell, in some schools they can’t even make the shape of a gun out of pop tarts without getting suspended.
The only way to stop a bad guy with a peanut allergy is with peanut butter, anyway, right? Well…I guess you could use other means that won’t bring harm to other innocent peanut allergy sufferers.
So in regards to schools that do ban peanut butter from being brought to school in order to safeguard kids who have a life-threatening allergic reaction to peanuts, should the ban be limited to just schools? After all, kids navigate through the world in many places aside from just their schools. How many deaths occur each year due to peanut allergies? Can these deaths be controlled by anti-peanut legislation? A national ban? Dennis Prager, years ago, felt those calling for a ban are doing so for selfish reasons, where the problems of the minority tyrannize the majority:
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, schools in “at least nine states” now ban peanuts and peanut butter. The reason? A few students are highly allergic to peanuts, and if not treated in time, the reaction can lead to death. Lest 1 or 2 percent of the students have a bad reaction to peanuts (a reaction that is entirely treatable by the school nurse), the cheapest, tastiest, healthiest food that most kids like — the peanut butter and jelly sandwich — is now forbidden in some American schools. We have here in microcosm five highly destructive developments in modern American life:
1. Social policies determined by “compassion.” To the Nickajack Elementary School’s principal and the many other Americans who support a peanut ban, the issue is simple: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on one side, the health of some students on the other. Compassion obviously dictates a peanut ban. More and more Americans want more and more of American social policy — from schools to government — to be guided by compassion. But compassion-first advocates do not understand that while compassion can and usually should determine personal behavior, it must almost never determine society’s behavior. When compassion determines social policy, it is almost always destructive. Because compassion is by definition highly selective, it is not possible to be equally compassionate to everyone.
When dealing with the public, compassion to some people inevitably means injustice to others. For example, if compassion for the sufferers of one disease determines society’s funding of research into that disease, sufferers of other diseases will receive less compassion and therefore unjustly receive less funding. Banning peanuts is unjust, even mean, to the 98 percent of elementary school students for whom peanut butter is the most practical source of protein they will eat at school. It is cheap, delicious, and won’t spoil as meat or cheese might. For the sake of a few students, thousands are seriously inconvenienced.
2. Compassion or selfishness? To deny nearly every student at an elementary school the right to eat their favorite healthy food is labeled compassion, and the educators who push for the ban may well be motivated by compassion. But the activists who demand the community’s compassion are simply selfish. On my radio show, I spoke to a parent whose child is highly allergic to peanuts, and who supports school bans on peanuts. After a few minutes of challenges, he acknowledged that he is simply being selfish. I saluted his honesty. Would that the rest of us acknowledge the selfishness that is at the root of so many policies determined by compassion.
3. Compassion trumps all. Compassion trumps all other considerations, especially facts and reason. The fact is that there is an antidote to peanut poisoning that every school can easily administer. The fact is that banning peanuts actually makes schools less safe for nut-allergic students, since they then let their guard down and think they can eat other students’ food. And reason suggests that if we ban peanuts, we should also ban school picnics to protect those who can die from bee stings. But to raise such objections only shows that one is not compassionate.
4. Fear of lawsuits. As powerful as compassion is, neither it nor justice dominates school, company or government policies today as much as fear of trial lawyers. Parents now sue schools for their children’s poor grades. Surely they will for allergic reactions.
5. The pursuit of a risk-free world. Perhaps it has been this generation’s unprecedented affluence. Perhaps it has been the absence of widespread suffering in America since World War II. Whatever the reason, more and more Americans have been preoccupied with abolishing all risks to their well-being. Americans increasingly feel that no price is too high to pay to ensure no risk. Such thinking, however, is very wrong. With fewer and fewer risks demanding ever more money and ever more legislation, the prices we are paying are getting ever steeper. Just ask the tens of thousands of schoolchildren now eating junk instead of peanut butter. If your kid is allergic to peanuts, have the school stock epinephrine. Don’t deprive all the other children of peanuts. That’s not compassionate; it’s selfish.
Recent research into peanut allergies seem to indicate that early exposure to peanuts is the key to prevention.
A group representing 26 professional organizations, advocacy groups, and federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has just issued new clinical guidelines aimed at preventing peanut allergy [1]. The guidelines suggest that parents should introduce most babies to peanut-containing foods around the time they begin eating other solid foods, typically 4 to 6 months of age. While early introduction is especially important for kids at particular risk for developing allergies, it is also recommended that high-risk infants—those with a history of severe eczema and/or egg allergy—undergo a blood or skin-prick test before being given foods containing peanuts. The test results can help to determine how, or even if, peanuts should be introduced in the youngsters’ diets.
This recommendation is turning older guidelines on their head. In the past, pediatricians often advised parents to delay introducing peanuts and other common causes of food allergies into their kids’ diets. But in 2010, the thinking began shifting when a panel of food allergy experts concluded insufficient evidence existed to show that delaying the introduction of potentially problematic foods actually protected kids [2].
I wonder if early firearms training/handling and education could prevent injury and accidental deaths by firearms?
Anyway, the entire attempt to draw an analogous or synonymous comparison is ridiculous. So I’ll quit my attempts to wrap sense around it. The sign is non- sense.
In regards to this whole March for Our Lives turnout, I do think it’s admirable for kids who truly are conscientious, being activist about their concerns and not just offering lip-service…even if they are entirely wrong.
What I do find ridiculous though, are those adults who are using the kids- especially the students-turned-activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School- as political props and political aegis from criticism of the anti-gun movement. Apparently, if you haven’t experienced firsthand the terror felt by these students during an active shooter situation (or even the anxiety and stress kids are being made to feel over the possibility of their school being locked down in the future by an active shooter), then you are a kind of chickenhawk and your opinion has less weight than that of these students who experienced the terror of a Parkland shooting or a Columbine. (It’s similar to the argument pushed around by the torture alarmists who use John McCain as their politically useful idiot prop (as opposed to valuing the opinion of Leo Thorsness) to denounce the CIA RDI program because he experienced REAL torture- so he must be an expert witness on the sins of enhanced interrogations- even though he seems to actually be pretty ignorant of the specifics of how the CIA interrogation program actually worked). This is like saying John Kerry’s opinion on war and the military has merit because he served in Vietnam. Or John Lennon is an authority because he lost a best friend to gun violence.
The Parkland shooting witnesses are taking moral leadership of the gun control debate, filling in the gaps where the adults have abandoned their responsibilities.
You must never criticize their perspective because they are victimized children.
Pick one.
The Parkland shooting witnesses demonstrate that 16-year-olds have important things to say about public policy. They should vote.
It’s obvious that we must raise the age to purchase a weapon to 21-years-old, that children should stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26, and that teenage criminals should be tried as juveniles.
Pick one.
The police response to the Parkland shooting demonstrates that a good guy with a gun cannot stop a bad guy with a gun.
Hand over your guns to the authorities, who will protect you from bad guys with guns.
Pick one.
Members of the NRA do not care about the deaths of children in mass shootings, because they continue to promulgate policies that make shootings more likely.
The media do care about the deaths of children in mass shootings, even if they continue to show the names and faces of shooters regularly and engage in the same sort of coverage studies show tend to make shootings more likely.
Pick one.
Parkland student David Hogg was completely right to shellac the NRA’s Dana Loesch over her culpability in the Parkland shootings.
Parkland student David Hogg was completely right to ignore the culpability of Sheriff Scott Israel in the Parkland shootings, because the facts aren’t out yet.
Pick one.
The shooting survivors are perfectly within their rights to suggest that Loesch and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) are morally inferior human beings who don’t care about the mass slaughter of innocent kids.
Americans are doing something deeply wrong by questioning whether it’s appropriate for survivors to impute nasty motives to those with whom they disagree.
Pick one.
Semi-automatic rifles must be banned because they are so commonly used in mass shootings.
The Second Amendment is not being threatened, and those who say it is are paranoid.
Pick one.
More armed security at schools won’t make children safer.
No, we in the media won’t give up our armed security.
Pick one.
What’s most annoying to me is the presumption that kids who have very little life experience somehow “know better”. That we adults should relinquish control of the reins of the world; and their way will reign in a national order filled with peace, free of gun violence.
What exactly is the goal of the anti-gun movement? An end to violence in general? Or just violence through the use of guns? Because those darn statistics, you know….?
Oh, and let’s politicize and not let any crisis go to waste and make this another opportunity to bring up race…
Anyone else see any “clever” signs they “liked” out there?
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.