I will agree, reluctantly, with samhain for one simple reason- most kids in a class room are under 22. Most of them have never had to do very much for themselves. As I said elsewhere, I wouldn't have trusted most of them with a baseball bat. I'm only 30, turn the clock back a year and I was in a tech school- when I was surrounded by the 20 year olds, I was the stranger in a strange land. They are kids, regardless of a legal status tied to a biological benchmark. They act in a manner I would have been embarrassed to act in when I was 14. I've watched them cry hysterically becuase they got a "B" on a paper; this was a member of the National Gaurd, by the way. It shocked, it didn't awe.

Now, there were some who didn't have thier lives pasturized, homoginized and sanitized for their protection. These are the guys (and gals) who didn't spend their childhoods drooling in front of the television, got cut, got scraped, broke bones by falling out of trees, all the stuff that parents generally don't let their kids do today. They are the kind of people who fit in here, like JIM or AROTC, and my brother, and the guys I'm trying to drag here. But they are those outsiders looking in, shaking their heads. The guys everyone else thinks is weird.

I will disagree with trusting my safety to a police officer. I went to a college that had 1 security guy on on each shift, and he was allowed by a step up the chain of command that was off the campus to carry neither pepper spray nor a baton. Most days, we had the head of security around unless he was in a meeting, or in court (he was also the county sheriff), but that was it. It takes 15 minutes to get an ambulance there most of the time, and 10 to get state troopers. At least the volunteer fire department is on the otherside of the soccer field. And I grew up in a place where the times we could have really used a cop, it was over 20 minutes get one there. In 20 minutes, I can beat someone to death with a soaked bath towel.

Someone with a firearm wouldn't have prevented all the deaths. Just a lot of them. If we are ever in the same place, samhain, you don't have to trust me. You've got my protection anyway, even if I am unarmed. I won't expect gratitude either, it is an emotion beyond the capacity of most humans. I would just ask people not to puke on me.