If you’ve ever dealt with a family member who is mentally ill, than you know that they think they are acting perfectly fine when everyone around them can see how irrational and deranged they are being. With our proposal to arm teachers, the United States has officially become the mentally ill family member of the human race.

When our answer to mass school shootings is to put more guns in the schools, we have not only lost the moral high ground, we have lost our minds.

Aside from the sheer insanity of this proposal, let’s look at the logistics. Let’s say there is a gun in a locked compartment in the classroom. No matter how ‘secret’ it is which teachers are carrying, you know damn well every student will know which teachers and which classrooms have the guns. How soon do you think it will be before a student figures out how to access the guns and kills other students and teachers with it? It doesn’t matter how fool-proof the lock is, someone will figure out a way to access it.

Or what about the teacher that accidentally kills an innocent child who she thought was a shooter? What are we going to say to her? What will the child’s parents say to her?

What will we do when the teacher or student who has access to a school sanctioned gun takes it home one day and uses it to kill their family members or neighbors?

It’s easy to mouth off and believe you’d play the hero in a fictional situation. Soldier’s written accounts of their experience in combat tell us when someone is opening fire on you the terror is indescribable. A deputy sheriff was the first to show up at the Parkland shooting and he stood outside for four minutes and never went in. Do you want to guess why? Yet we are naive enough to believe that with a little bit of training we can turn our teachers into combat soldiers.

There is something very disturbing about America’s obsession with guns. We are the only country in the free world that has this problem. Wouldn’t the answer lie in talking to other countries and finding out what they’re doing that prevents these massacres, rather than multiplying the very thing that’s causing them in the first place? We don’t do that because it would mean stricter gun laws and banning assault rifles, and our politicians don’t want to give up the millions they get from the NRA. Our lives are worthless to them. What matters is keeping their pockets stuffed with gun lobby cash.

Increasing guns in the schools where our children go to learn, rather than banning access to the assault rifles that cause the slaughters is insane. This is not normal. None of this is normal.