Demonizing guns also demonizes police officers. I’ve said it before, I’ll probably say it again, and again, and… After all, no one likes it when people describe something they depended on for their lives for decades described as evil, not to mention people also perceiving them as evil for carrying an important tool of the trade to overcome evil.
Edmonds, Washington is a picturesque city nestled along the Puget Sound coastline, with trains, cars, and ferryboats busily coexisting where dock, road, and tracks intersect. But some people in this town aren’t all that excited about coexisting—with the cops. A controversy that shouldn’t exist has developed, as it has in too many American communities.
According to lynnwoodtoday.com, the Edmonds School District wishes to protect its students by replacing a school resource officer (SRO), assigned from the Edmonds Police Department, in Edmonds Heights K-12. EH K-12 is an alternative school for “high-risk and special-needs” students.
The Edmonds School District, encompassing four high schools of which Edmonds Heights is one, had to discontinue school resource officers in 2011 due to budget cuts. However, now that the economy is doing well, the district is able to fund SRO positions, and the officers were to return to the schools to protect and get to know the children.
However, as is so common today, even woefully uninformed people whose comments and concerns are not grounded in reality, get to have their say—as it should be in America. But how much weight should ignorant (or even unstable) views carry? Some parents’ lack of knowledge about what cops do is what struck me about this issue. It wasn’t that it upset some people that cops were in the schools (of course they’re upset; leftists can’t go a day without being victims of or offended by something) but about why it upset them.
Edmonds Heights parent, Reita Johnson, expressed her opinion at a parent meeting on April 25, 2019. Apparently, she’s concerned about the wording of the position: “[SRO] doesn’t seem very transparent. What you think of when you hear ‘student resource officer’ is not a uniformed, armed police officer.” Uh, yeah, it is!
Maybe it’s not what she thinks of, but it’s what 99.9 percent of the rest of us think of. The story explains how “several parents” mentioned the “trauma” some students “and even adults” would suffer upon merely seeing a cop with a gun in a school setting. Hey, America! Cops carry guns…get over it!
SROs fulfill several obvious roles while serving in a school setting. Two of the most important roles are that of protector and relationship builder—in that order, although, fortunately, relationship-building occurs most often. Parents like the one mentioned above constantly complain about the lack of positive relationships between kids and cops. Well, what better way to establish this than putting cops where the kids are? We insure our homes, cars, even lives. But some of us refuse to insure our children while they are in school, which is precisely what having a cop on campus does.
Some parents and many school districts have brainwashed their children to fear cops and despise the guns they carry, from the moment they enter kindergarten. From the ridiculous and ubiquitous gun-free zone signs to parents’ support for anti-cop myth-spreading groups like BLM and the neo-socialist Democratic Party.
Myedmondsnews.com reported another parent said, “A lot of us are very fearful about how this interaction could go.” Yeah, the cops may even play basketball with the kids—oh, the humanity!
A seventh-grade student at the meeting reportedly said “she would not feel safe or be able to express herself with an SRO on campus.” Seventh-grade kids don’t come up with these views about cops without toxic input from influential adults. This is not a psychologically healthy view of the police for a child.
American school districts have done a phenomenal job of demonizing guns, thus they have also demonized those who carry them for a living: cops. I wish it were as simple as police being leftist indoctrination collateral damage. But leftists have cops in their (pardon the pun) sights. It is not normal to fear having cops assigned to protect children should the unthinkable happen.
Though rare, school shootings still happen too often because once is too often. But we also know, or should know, the best way to protect our children at school (and at home) is the same way we protect the diamonds in our jewelry stores, the money in our banks, and leftist celebrities—with good men and women with guns.
The concerned parents of Edmonds Heights K-12 should think about that, and they should educate themselves about police officers, what they’re really like, and what they really do.
