Tornado slams OK school

[Constitutional Paulicy]

Here is aerial video footage of the schools mentioned....

​

 

[Lucille]

Why There Was No Basement Tornado Shelter in That Oklahoma City School
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/137854.html

In one of my earlier books I cited former New York City Mayor Ed Koch explaining why the city's "infrastructure" (sewer and water lines, bridges and roads, etc.) always seemed to be long overdue for maintenance and rebuilding: "It's hard to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new sewer line," said the mayor.

Government turns everything it touches into crap, and economics provides numerous explanations why. In this case, Mayor Koch hit the nail on the head: Politicians like himself will always spend taxpayers' money in a way that enhances THEIR popularity and maximizes THEIR chances for re-election. There are orders of magnitude more votes to be had in handing out welfare benefits or lavish public employee pensions than in replacing leaky water lines. Public employees are well organized politically; the average taxpaying citizens are not.

As for Oklahoma City, news reports are that there was not an underground basement in that public school where nine children died during the tornado. An explanation is that when it comes to spending money on "schools," broadly defined, there are many, many more votes and campaign contributions to be had by spending the money on increased public school teacher and administrator salaries and pensions than on school building basements. Teachers' unions are famously well organized politically; average taxpayers are not. Putting a basement in a new school building will not motivate government school teachers to spend thousands of hours campaigning and driving voters to the polls in school buses. Promises of pay and pension increases will.

So go ahead. Keep sending your children to government schools.

Homeschool or Die vol. XXXLVI
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2013/05/homeschool-or-die-vol-xxxlvi.html

And yet, in the past four months, we have seen multiple incidences of multiple fatalities due to acts of Man and Nature, but the thought that perhaps it is not wise to congregate large numbers of vulnerable children together never seems to enter the national discourse.

According to Wikipedia, there have been 278 tornado-related deaths at school since 1885. That is nearly 2.2 deaths per year, which is a trivial percentage of the 48 million or so children attending the public schools. And yet, they are entirely avoidable deaths; under the oft-cited "if just one life can be saved" metric, it cannot be denied that children who are not forced to congregate en masse at school cannot be killed by tornadoes there.

Two tornado-inflicted deaths per year isn't much, but add to them the 26 schoolbus deaths per year, the 600 school-automotive deaths per year, and the 34 violence-related deaths, and it soon becomes readily apparent that school cannot reasonably be considered a safe place for children.

Forget the superior education received by homeschooled children. Doesn't saving the lives of more than 662 children every year make banning school a moral imperative?

Especially in light of the fact that 119 children under the age of twelve, (and 565 under the age of 18), were killed by guns. School is literally more lethally dangerous than guns; something you might want to remind your average pro-public school, pro-gun control left-liberal.

Guns secure freedom at a lower cost in children's lives than the public schools manage to deliver inferior educations. We don't need gun control, we need school control.