Pick up your kid, pick up your gun

This week in asinine news, the Indiana House passed a controversial bill allowing people to carry guns onto school grounds as long as they are locked and out of sight in parked cars.

The National Rifle Association and the other proponents of the bill rejoiced. They claim this is a step in the right direction. They believe all those parents might inadvertently have guns in their cars as they go to pick up their kids from school deserve these protections.

First of all, you should never inadvertently have a gun with you.

If you are carrying a firearm on your body, or even in your car, it should always be on your mind. A gun is a deadly weapon. We can’t afford flippancy when guns are involved.

Second, I have to admit I side with Rep. Vernon Smith, D-14th District, who claimed, “When people are emotional, that’s when they do their worst job of critical thinking. They don’t think. They just act.” I don’t know about you, but trying to pick a kid up from school is up there with public speaking on the list of recipes for instant anxiety.

There’s intense traffic, you’re tired from the day you’ve had, children are running all around the cars and you just want to get home to dinner. So let’s approve adding a gun to that mix. I say all of this only slightly tongue-in-cheek.

Road rage and gun violence, unfortunately, can go hand in hand.

In September 2013, Matthew Webster shot Anna Alger six times and killed her after Alger confronted Webster for running a red light and nearly hitting her car. The incident left many people talking about the effects of guns and road rage.

It’s an extreme case, yes. But there’s no reason why we should trust human emotion and temper when there are documented cases like that to prove our fallibility. Rep. Jim Lucas, R-69th District, thinks the current state of the law is out of hand.  The law, as it exists right now, makes it a Class D felony to leave a gun unattended in a school parking lot.

And I think this is fair. The risk is just too high, and there are far too many scenarios where things can go wrong.

Even if it’s not the parent, no one can absolutely  say that the student being picked up from school won’t accidentally find the gun while a parent is talking to a teacher?

There are far too many what ifs Indiana has failed to recognize because we’re too blinded by the flash of silver. It would be surprising to see the bill actually signed into law, but it’s disheartening it passed the House in the first place.


sjostrow@indiana.edu