Just when I thought it was safe to go outside again, along comes a national controversy so rife with grotesque implications that I’m hard pressed to keep up this facade of sanity any longer. Hold all my calls.

If you know me, you know that I’m paranoid by nature. Rose-tinted glasses can find no purchase on my tiny head. I’m allergic to Chill Pills. I’ve been “having a bad day” for almost three years now, and tomorrow ain’t looking so hot either. I’m not well and I spend too much time alone, driven to self-imposed isolation by fever dreams of madmen on the loose and mass graveyards crying out for more customers.

As you may have gathered, my view of the world is dim at best. When I put the “Humanity” disc in my View-Master, I see a hopelessly misshapen, fundamentally flawed band of lunatic castaways, piloting Mother Earth in to the cosmic commode and serving champagne on the flight. As for that famous “benefit of the doubt”, I’m beginning to doubt if I’ll ever dole it out again. My faith in humankind is ever on the wane and shows no signs of waxing. I don’t trust us. Not you, not you, and definitely not that crowd in the AAR chat room (just kidding, Philip11101 – call me!).

Simply put, I think we’re screwed. In my 26 years of (gravely unscientific) research, I’ve determined that terminal self-destruction is the modus operandi of the human race. If there’s one thing we excel at, it’s killing. This is not melodrama or bleeding-heart liberalism; this is fact. For every step we take forward as a unit, we end someone else’s steps forever with a well placed incendiary round, or a smattering of napalm for pizzaz. The kicker is, we tell ourselves that we had to do it, that killing is a part of life, or that in some cases it is good and right, a fulfillment of some hastily erected sense of earthly duty or of God’s grand design. We have a bottomless reservoir of justifications which serve to perpetuate this endless cycle of violence. Rarely do we even attempt to understand our too-requited love for bloodshed and savagery. Thus, when I picture the world in my mind’s eye, I am moved to recall the timeless words of one Wayne Campbell: “Well, it certainly does suck”.

Party on, Wayne – and party on, Garth. You’ll both be dead soon enough, just like the rest of us. More meat for the grinder.

I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m crazy, accentuating the negative to the exclusion of any positive. (You’re not alone – that’s what my father thinks). Perhaps you think that my screeds are indicative of my own repressed tendencies, furtive gropes exchanged between my own self-loathing and a crippling fear of my fellow man. You might think that I pursue my grim obsessions to an unhealthy degree, resulting in an almost psycho-sexual desire to baptize myself in the tepid rivers of blood that flow forever behind my closed eyelids. Admit it, folks: you think I’m nuts.

Well, relax, all you Freuds of the world-wide-armchair. Apparently I’m small potatoes when it comes to mental infirmity. If you think I’m crazy, hang on to your party hats. In the words of Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, “B-b-b-b-baby, you just ain’t seen nothing yet”. Let me introduce you to a guy who makes me look like the Rock of Ages when it comes to emotional stability.

Meet David Thweatt. Mr. Thweatt is the Supreme Allied Commander of the Harrold Independent School District[1]. This guy embodies paranoia to such an extent that he makes me look like a motivational speaker. Mr. Thweatt is the default national spokesperson for a new policy whereby teachers will be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus and in the classroom, ostensibly making them better prepared to respond to a school-shooting type of incident. Stay with me here.

The explanations for this policy (which, incidentally, has been endorsed by the Governor of Texas) are twofold. On the one hand, says Mr. Thweatt, his school of 115 students is situated 25 miles from the nearest Sheriff’s office, severely extending response time in the event of a violent incident. Secondly, the agrarian community of Harrold Texas is accessible by Interstate 287, a major highway that (Thweatt feels) offers unfettered access to the town to any number of gun-toting madmen. Here’s where Mr. Thweatt really starts to lose it. “We are 30 minutes from law enforcement. How long do you think it would take to kill all 150 of us? It would be a bloodbath.”

Wow. There are so many problems bubbling under the surface of this story that I don’t even know where to start. But wait, Mr. Thweatt isn’t done theorizing yet. Get a load of this doozy: “We’ve had a very disturbing trend of school shootings in the U.S. It is my belief that this is caused by making schools gun-free zones. When schools were made gun-free zones, they became targets for people who wanted to rack up the body count.”

So, the federal government’s attempt to legislate guns out of classrooms somehow sent a signal to a handful of isolated youths in far-flung locations that it was time to descend on their respective schools and start shooting? Not only does that make no sense, it is very unclear how it relates to Mr. Thweatt’s fear of marauding highway madmen (whom he actually, I swear to God, refers to as “bad guys”). I think we can all agree that school shootings are, by and large, committed by students who have a particular emotional attachment to the school itself, as the site of their mistreatment at the hands of their peers or whatever the case may be. So to speculate that the mere existence of a highway nearby places the school in grave danger of completely random gun violence makes very little sense and speaks to a paranoia and a fetishism for guns that can only be indicative of a very ill national mind. Not to mention the fact that, given that unstable and violent people do exist, what better way to attract them to Nowheresville Texas than by all of this publicity?

You folks are smart, so I don’t think I need to go through all of the practical problems presented by teachers carrying concealed guns in classrooms (friendly fire incidents, kids getting a hold of Mrs. Cleary’s vintage Luger, etc.). What is perhaps more troubling about this precedent is what it says about our national obsession with guns and our refusal to admit that increasing the presence of guns almost always goes hand in hand with increasing the incidence of gun violence, no matter who’s wearing the guns under their blazers.

This is like John McCain’s foreign policy in miniature. When Mr. McCain sees instability in the world, it often seems that his first instinct is to drop bombs on it. When Mr. Thweatt sees irrational specters of crazed gunmen descending on his sleepy community of 300 citizens, his first instinct is to pass out guns to the men and women charged with educating the youth of his district. There is a war going on in this man’s mind, and it speaks to the brain damage we have sustained as a nation due to our inability to deal with the root causes (psychological or emotional) of irrational violent acts. Rather than weed guns out of our national zeitgeist, luminaries like Mr. Thweatt want to arm everyone who could ever possibly be under threat of violence (which means…everyone).

Thweatt and men like him are overgrown children, bumbling excuses for adults flexing their muscles and parading their toys before a pitiable group of kids who (unfortunately for them) look to them to learn. I don’t doubt that Mr. Thweatt is host to some genuine degree of concern for the students of Harrold, but the idea that their well-being is in his hands is deeply troubling.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this half-wit amateur social theorist is the type who would suggest, like our politicians so often do, that video games and heavy metal music are partially to blame for the kind of violence we saw in Columbine. Yes, video games, music, Hollywood movies – but surely not the fact that kids look up to an adult culture that is positively obsessed with guns and views them as a panacea for the problem of violence.

Imagine the mental and emotional climate created by a school wherein the kids know that their teachers are packing heat. Forget the idea of how much easier this would make it for a child to act out in dramatically violent ways, forget the obvious problems posed by a teacher’s over-zealous, hail of gunfire response to a perceived threat that isn’t really there…just think about the way you would feel in a class being conducted by somebody with a gun. Class, open your textbooks to “Dystopian Nightmare”!

But in Texas, it’s up to the individual institutions to decide what they will allow, and Harrold has made its decision. Fair enough. It’s out my hands, and I’ll try to put it out of my mind. The elders of Harrold have turned their backs on reason and common sense, so let’s turn our backs on them…until such time as we are called upon to collectively mourn a tragedy that the rest of us saw coming from much more than 25 miles away.

And there you have it my friends: David Thweatt, a man who takes the time-tested combination of latent paranoid schizophrenia and a troubling love of firearms to new heights of lunatic grandeur. Perhaps only a person as troubled as me can truly understand his mindset. I know his paranoia. I know his fear. I know him. Hell, this guy is like Bizarro Derm. His mental landscape is so similar to mine, he reminds me so much of me, I’m almost worried that the next time eats bad shellfish, I’ll get sick. He’s like my twin, save for the fact that we are separated by a vast ideological chasm when it comes to the problem of gun violence. And the fact that, however deeply disturbed I might be, I’m still lucid enough to know that the solution to gun violence must be something a tad more enlightened than more guns.