If you think today’s educators should be packing guns, may I point out that any ape can be taught, pretty quickly, to pick up a gun, aim, shoot and hit the bull’s eye. But frighten or confuse that ape, and you have a screeching, spinning, out of control creature waving a gun and firing willy-nilly at anything and everything.

I’m not inferring that educators are no better than apes, at least not in the intellectual sense. And although some may be ex-military, most are like those of us able to (maybe) kill a stationary deer at 100 yards.

So imagine a panicked teacher, fearing for her students’ lives and her own, who hears a sound and starts firing in the direction she thinks it came from. Soon bullets are ricocheting all over the place and hitting goodness knows what or whom!

I wonder, is there any self- respecting educator who wants to think that it might have been his shot that killed the principal, or school nurse, or a child, or one of the very people sent to save them?

In the “spaghetti westerns” all the actors get up, dust off and go out for a drink after the “shoot.” Alas, in real life some folks aren’t that lucky.

For many years we’ve endured increasing social, economic, political stress, and such burgeoning paranoia that we’ve become virtually unaware of it until somebody cracks and goes off fully cocked.

Stop gun violence by recognizing and relieving the pressure.

Diana Tozier, Poland