Teachers should be trained, armed, to defend themselves COMMENTARY WILLIAM A. LEVINSON

Blood on the floor politics is the exploitation of a sensational incident to advance a political agenda. It works because emotion overwhelms rational thought, and often with catastrophic consequences. The destruction of the U.S.S. Maine (1898) delivered to self-serving warmongers gallons of American blood with which to start a war with Spain. The loss of hundreds of American civilians, including children, on the Lusitania (1915), gave warmongers the blood they needed to start a war with Germany. Americans saw only dead children, and not the cargo of British rifle ammunition that gave Germany every right in the world to sink the ship.

The unseemly alacrity with which President Obama, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for renewed attacks on the Second Amendment gives the perception, right or wrong, that they almost welcomed the Sandy Hook school shooting. It gave them the blood they needed to revive an agenda that I personally helped put down in 2000, by exposing the anti-Second Amendment Million Mom March's use of 501(c)(3) tax exempt money for electioneering. (Google on Perhaps they need a background check on their tax knowledge to see J.R. Labbe's column on this matter; I am the person who gave her the information).

President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg are, meanwhile, two of the last people on earth with any standing to talk about gun control. Mr. Obama's Justice Department orchestrated more than 2,000 gun felonies (straw purchases) in Operation Fast and Furious, at a cost of 150 Mexican lives. Another criminal used a Fast and Furious weapon to kill a U.S. law enforcement officer, Brian Terry.

Mr. Bloomberg's police, meanwhile, emulated Al Capp's fictional detective Fearless Fosdick by wounding nine innocent bystanders in a gun battle with a violent felon. A mayor who gives his police officers slipshod and perfunctory firearm training sets them up to kill or maim innocent people, or be killed by violent felons who shoot them first.

If gun control laws are a quack prescription for school shootings, what is the real cure? Israel is surrounded by terrorists who, unlike Adam Lanza, are backed by paramilitary organizations with access to genuine assault weapons (fully automatic machine guns), and also grenades.

The last noteworthy school shooting in Israel, however, took place 38 years ago. The reason is, of course, that many Israeli teachers are now legally armed in the classroom.

If Sandy Hook staff members had had access to firearms, and had also attended Front Sight's four-day defensive handgun class in Pahrump Nev., Adam Lanza's rampage would have come to a rapid end. I can recommend this course based on personal experience, and I encourage any legislator or member of Congress who wants to educate himself or herself on this matter to take it as well.

It is normally $2,000, but there are frequent promotional discounts. Front Sight's owner, Dr. Ignatius Piazza, has meanwhile offered free defensive handgun training for up to three designated safety monitors from each school district. Google on Front Sight Special Blog: When Will We Wake Up? for details. Gunsite in Paulden AZ (founded by Colonel Jeff Cooper) offers similar instruction.

I also noticed The Times Leader's cartoon of an unarmed teacher trying to protect children. I prefer the image of the teacher pointing in at the school shooter with a revolver or a semiautomatic pistol, and thus living to go home to her own family.

William A. Levinson is the author of Henry Ford's Lean Vision: Enduring Principles from the First Ford Motor Plant and other books on quality, management, and industrial productivity.