Saturday, December 15, 2012

After Newtown, Does Teaching Qualify as a 'Dangerous' Job?

Rick Snyder and the rest of the Lansing Republicans offered up a lot of phony resons for rushing through their anti-working family legislation but one of the phoniest had to be that police and firefighters should be exempted from the legislation because of the "dangerousness of their jobs."

Teachers don't have dangerous jobs, in Snyder's view.

It didn't take long for those words to come back to bite Snyder, did it?

The shooting of 27 people at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school on Friday should remind us all that teaching, at least since Columbine, is a dangerous profession. Some schools have metal detectors.Some have police in their buildings. Classrooms at the University of Michigan have instructions on the wall regarding what to do if there is an "active shooter" in the area. But teaching is not a dangerous job, according to Snyder.

Teaching shouldn't be a dangerous job. But with a nation awash in semi-automatic weapons and a culture that glorifies violence, every job is a dangerous job. Snyder made it evenmore dangerous by signing legislation allowing guns in schools. Just what we need in the wake of Newtown.

Snyder needs to be held accountable.

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