the only answer

[dukealien]

the only answer
to a bad guy with a gun-
4th graders with guns

One of my favorite pursuits or inquiries is how we determine (very quickly) when a word is nonsense even if it's pronounceable and *looks* just like a word - "quimbic" or "spettuck," for example.  The mind (or brain) has to not only run down some sort of recognition chain, but know - almost instantly - when it's run out of meanings.

Now, this senryu achieves its nonsense by ricocheting (if you will   ) off the common bumper sticker, "the answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  Nonsense - the bitten end of a chain - arrives by replacing "a good guy" with "4th graders," who are by definition as amoral as a bad guy is (by definition) immoral and a "good guy" is moral.  More subtly, inserting "only" which excludes all other responses to the bad guy, produces a lofty nonsense on stilts.  It can't even rejoin the real world by inserting "[S]ometimes" at the very beginning because there is no conceivable situation where any fourth-grader(s) would have the moral or physical strength to respond.  (No doubt it's happened, but I'd put a lower limit at about grade 6.  And not all children that age, by any means.)

The question, then, is how to create a response to the (armed) bad guy which doesn't leave this nonsense as the only outcome.  Arming teachers (and, no less than sixth-graders, only the right ones) could be a partial solution; detecting and neutralizing (*not* the military definition) bad people before they act out extreme bad behavior also has to be part of it, but where does drawing pictures of guns (hell, I used to do that all the time) become fantasizing using them against people they knew or would meet (never did that) , and  that to taking action (the only legitimate point where law can intervene)?

I think it has to be a matter of training children to differentiate, at an early age, between fantasy and reality, and to be very circumspect and self-censoring about reality without losing the creative spark.  Maybe culture used to repress too much, but the fantasy of fourth-graders gunning down a desperado is definitely to be repressed.

Which is why it's a great little poem:  it makes us think about where we went off the track.