Students often want to write papers about the same old topics. Abortion. Legalizing weed. The death penalty. Gun control.

Read a few dozen of those papers, and you’ll want to stick a knife right in your own damn head. I banned papers on these often-plagiarized topics. But I did sometimes allow class discussion.

If the topic of gun control came up in my classroom, I’d ask my students to imagine I’d come to class in a menopausal rage.

“If I had a knife, and I threw it at John there in the back row, and it stuck right in his head, what would y’all do?” I’d ask.

Students would laugh, scream, squeal, or pick at their fingernails, but one would finally say “We’d jump on you.”

“Exactly,” I’d say. “Now imagine I came into class with a semi-automatic weapon and started mowing y’all down in one magnificent menopausal moment. What would you do then?”

I wouldn’t make that argument in a classroom today; in fact, I never made it again after Sandy Hook. But there’s another reason teachers shouldn’t have guns besides being driven mad by menopause or by having read too many crappy essays.

Teachers are human beings, and human beings fuck up.

In all the talk about the right to bear arms and the Constitution, this simple fact never seems to come up — that human beings are fallible. We do things we don’t intend to do. We lose our tempers, and we lose our minds. All of us.

Yesterday, a teacher and off-duty police officer accidentally fired a gun while teaching a public safety class. As far as I can tell, he isn’t menopausal. Thankfully, there were only minor injuries. . .

You can read the rest of this post (minus the f-word), if you like, on Medium.