Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2008 > August > 19
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Ga. beaten to the draw again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In recent years, Florida and Texas have set the pace with legislation encouraging the spread and use of firearms, with Georgia legislators scurrying along to catch up.
Well, wait until the “bullet boys” in the Georgia Legislature hear about this one. Once again, the Peach Staters been beaten to the draw.
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Gov. Rick Perry indicated Monday that he supports a school district’s decision to allow teachers and staff to pack guns for protection when classes start this month.
Trustees of the Harrold Independent School District approved a policy change last year to allow employees to carry concealed firearms to deter and protect against school shootings.
“There’s a lot of incidents where that would have saved a number of lives,” Perry said after a news conference in Austin.
Texas law outlaws firearms on school campuses unless specific institutions allow them.
District policy requires a teacher carrying a gun to school to have a Texas concealed handgun license, authorization by the district to carry the weapon, training in crisis management and hostile situations, and ammunition designed to minimize the risk of ricochet.
Where’s all this going to end? Not until guns are everywhere and Americans are as safe and secure as, say, Baghdad?
Permalink | Comments (159) | Post your comment |
John McCain and the moment of conception
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In his appearance at Saddleback Church over the weekend, John McCain made clear his belief that human life begins at the moment of conception. While I respect that opinion, it does raise some troubling problems.
If human life begins at the moment of conception, it means that abortion must be outlawed in all instances, with no possible exception for pregnancies that result from rape or incest. By McCain’s definition, those embryos are human beings that must be protected, without regard to how they might have been created.
It also means that IUDs are not a form of birth control but murder weapons, because they operate by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, thus starving it to death. Some prolife physicians even believe that the birth-control pill is an abortion device, because in some cases the pill can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.
And then there’s the issue of fertility clinics. A few years ago, I did a story on a clinic here in Atlanta. I watched as a technician, operating with a microscope, collected a single sperm and injected it into a human egg, thus by McCain’s definition creating a human being.
Scattered all around the clinic were small, squat vats of liquid hydrogen, containing frozen embryos that, again by McCain’s definition, were human. The vats contained thousands of such embryos, just in that one clinic. Some were destined to be implanted in human womb in the hope that they would begin to thrive, although most would not. Others were destined to be destroyed because the couples that had arranged for their creation already had the children they were seeking. That would be mass murder, as McCain would have it.
It also means, of course, that stem cell research into cures for Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, diabetes and other diseases is murder and must be abandoned immediately.
Services »
