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A School District In Pennsylvania Just Armed Its Teachers With Mini Baseball Bats As A ‘Last Resort’

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At this point, the lengths to which people are having to go to deal with our country’s lack of gun control laws would be verging on comical if it weren’t so depressing.

Since the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the Millcreek Township School District in Pennsylvania has decided to address school safety by arming its 500 teachers with miniature baseball bats.

Yes. Really. Small baseball bats.

While Donald Trump’s idea of arming teachers with guns still seems like an alarmingly bad idea, arming educators with vending machine toys really adds insult to injury.  Wouldn’t it just be easier for representatives to, I don’t know, actually pass some gun control legislation?

“It is the last resort,” Superintendent William Hall admitted to Erie News Now. “But, it is an option and something we want people to be aware of.”

“Unfortunately, we’re in a day and age where one might need to use them to protect ourselves and our kids.”

This move admittedly serves as a happy medium for teachers who aren’t keen on Trump’s idea of carrying firearms themselves. If anything, the bats are meant to be “symbolic,” says Hall.

Jon Cacchione, the president of the local educators union, seemed to agree. “It’s to make people comfortable with the idea that they can attack and not simply go into hard lockdown and just hide, as we’d been told in our training up to this point,” he tells the Erie Times-News.

Strangely enough, this is not the first instance of a Pennsylvania school district arming its educators with weapons other than guns.

For the past several years, the Blue Mountain School District has provided classrooms with buckets full of river rocks, which are meant to be thrown at any unwelcome intruders.

We have some people who have some pretty good arms — they can chuck some rocks pretty fast,” Superintendent David Helsel commented at a recent hearing. “If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance to any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full of students armed with rocks, and they will be stoned.”

It’s tempting to be darkly amused by the situation, since the mental image of teachers fending off a gunman with rocks or tiny baseball bats is utterly absurd. But, it isn’t amusing — it’s dispiriting. This isn’t an issue educators should have to concern themselves with, considering the fact that teaching students is an exhausting task unto itself. And yet, here we are.

Our lawmakers are so collectively spineless that the nation’s teachers may very well be forced to miraculously transform into crime-fighters at the drop of a hat, wielding weapons (or rocks, or toys) that they should have never had to wield in the first place.