Sheriff Jim Hammond addresses the press after speaking to the school board about ways to prevent a massacre or stop one while in progress. He has not been convinced to exercise his authority as the most powerful peacekeeper in Hamilton County, Tenn., to close public schools and thereby save lives. (Photo David Tulis)
If closing Hamilton County schools saves a single life tomorrow, is it worth taking the bold step today to close schools to avert a massacre?
If closing public schools as a public menace this month saves five lives 30 days from now, what might trigger in Sheriff Jim Hammond’s mind the risk-reduction step of a shutdown?
By David Tulis / 92.7 NoogaRadio
If shutting the state church for materialist morality in 2018 saves 10 lives, such as those lost in Texas, in 2019, how many more slayings must occur before Mr. Hammond, or his successor this election, declare public schools a nuisance abated only by a final lockdown?
These are questions that have not been strongly present in the mind of Sheriff Hammond, if it has encountered them at all. But with each successive mass public school slaughter, such as one Friday in Sante Fe, the idea might well become more than just a glimmer.
When I asked this main question March 22 to Sheriff Hammond after he had addressed the Hamilton County school board in its gated and barb-wired compound, he gave a start, glared at me and asked, “ David, why would you ask such a question?”
Question better than the answer
It’s not a bad question when one considers that government schools are a magnet for deranged people with legal firearms who kill students en masse in postmodernist exhibitions of self-directed personal and existential morality.
The question you should ask your county sheriff on the campaign trail is this: Can you guarantee that my son or daughter will not be slain in his Hamilton County school?
The answer is no. The sheriff cannot guarantee security for any one child.
He looks at the big picture. He provides the services of SROs and roving patrols, and operates a rapid-response SWAT team ready to shoot it out with an attacker. He rightly runs a show of security, but in fact there is no security and he cannot provide it for any one child. His security is general, not particular. His security is propositional, not promissory. The supreme court has said no one has a right to police protection or involvement, that no one has a right to an immediate response from a cop in the middle of a robbery or rape.
Sheriff Hammond provides security for the system — the bureaucracy — with his own system, with his own bureaucracy. System helps system.
No promise to protect your child
Killers elude such measures and satisfy themselves with their blaze of glory in hallways and classrooms, often intending to kill themselves or have themselves be killed by authorities’ fire when they are trapped or run out of ammo.
Against the courageous private gunman with slaughter in his heart, Sheriff Hammond cannot save the life of your child and would not dare make any such promise. He can make promises about the system, but not about any one child in that system.
It’s just like public health. Public health people at CDC care about the whole of a population, not any particular individual who is damaged or destroyed by a vaccine program or a policy based on a faddish junk science-based theory. Public school security cannot conceive of the individual child. It promises only an overall response to rescue the overall school that dreadful day terror strikes.
Your son, your daughter, are just the awful detail, one of the ones who didn’t make it.
The threat of a massacre in Hamilton County increases because at what sociologist Malcolm Gladwell describes massacres as a slow motion riot, with each event lowering the threshold for others to go and do likewise.
Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin describes this process in his 1941 book Crisis of our Age, and R.J. Rushdoony and others have described the atomization of society caused by a change of religion from worship of God to submission the modern savior state.
The Christian establishment in Chattanooga has many reasons to call for an exodus from the state school. With massacres and random attacks fueled by the materialist and naturalistic humanism that is the school theology, it has even more reason to urge Christian people to live faithful to their religious professions. Let’s see if any gospel minister puts his ideas in worship and his social policy together into a public statement.
Perhaps Sheriff Hammond can save them the trouble of drawing just conclusions from their Bibles they have refused to make. Christian supporters of public schools look from the inside-out and refuse to be revolted by the public school’s morality and ethic. Perhaps Sheriff Hammond can look at the school death traps from the outside-in, declare public school in Hamilton County an extraordinary health hazard and a threat to public safety.
Militarization of schools in the interest of “security” has already gone very far, with deputies in the hall and students across the U.S. are subjected to surveillance, supervision, detention, arrest, gassings, tasings, beatings and happy induction into the prison-industrial complex (“noncompliance with a lawful order,” don’t you know). The fact that the factory school is so insular and police state-state like is an argument against anyone — Christian or nonbeliever — sending a child to one. Now that any one classroom or hallway can be breached by a gunman suggests it is time to shut down these killer magnets as indefensible.
Sources: David French, “The Best Explanation for Our Spate of Mass Shootings Is the Least Comforting,” National Review. May 18, 2018
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