Pennsylvania School Has Strange, Rocky Solution To School Shootings

A sample of the river rocks at a school district in Pennsylvania.
Students are expected to throw these rocks if a mass shooter
invades a school in the district. 

As you surely saw on the news, hundreds of thousands of people, a large proportion of them teenagers. demonstrated Saturday to push for gun restrictions they hope would stop or at least diminish all the mass shootings this country experiences.

However, as you also might have heard on the news, a Pennsylvania school district has already solved the problem. Or at least they think so. Color me and almost everybody else, um, skeptical.

The Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania says river rocks will do the trick.

You know river rocks. Those are the stones you find in brooks and streams that have been worn down smooth by the water. That smoothness makes them easy to pick up, grasp and throw at somebody you don't like.

Including mass shooters, at least in the minds of the people in this school district.

I'm not sure how a few river rocks thrown at a maniac assailant armed with an AR-15 would end the rampage, but what do I know?

BuzzFeed News quoted District School Superintendent David Helsel this way:

"If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance to any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full of student armed with rocks. And they will be stoned."

OK, now I'm confused. Does he mean the armed intruder will be stoned, as in, having a bunch of rocks thrown at him like those barbaric executions back in the olden days?

Or does he mean the people throwing the rocks will be stoned, as in totally high on weed? If the students are high, I can't imagine their aim would be all that good.

Anyway, Helsel continues: "We have some people who have pretty good arms. They can chuck some rocks pretty fast."

I don't want to disparage the fine student athletes in the Schuylkill County Blue Mountain School District. I'm sure members of the district's baseball teams can throw a mean curve ball. I bet the baseball and softball teams there are second to none.

Still, despite the athletic prowess of these students, I'm not sure if the speed of their rock throws can outmatch the speed of bullets from an AR-15.

But again, what do I know?

To be fair, this school district has other mass shooting protocols, including lockdowns and lock-ins, where students and teachers lock classroom doors in the hopes an armed assailant can't get in.

Still, the armed maniac could still get it, and Helsel doesn't want the people in the classrooms to be sitting ducks, nosiree!

So, each classroom has a five-gallon bucket of river stones. Helsel figures there might be 25 students  and a teacher in any given classroom, so that's a lot of people throwing stones.

But what happens when the bucket is emptied out.? Assuming anybody has survived to this point. Helsel insists it's better than nothing. "Under the circumstances, it is a better response than passively crawling under a desk and allowing someone to break into a classroom."

However, like all shootings and attacks, is Helsel right? A person shooting wildly with an AR-15 or something might not notice a kid cowering in the dark under a desk, but he or she would surely notice a kid pegging rocks at him.

Personally, I'd rather a person with a semi-automatic firearm not notice me.

It appears that at least some parents in the Blue Mountain School District are as dubious about this river rock safety plan as I am.

Regan Cameron Hutchins tweeted: "Welcome to Schuylkill County, where the people are dumb but the rocks are plentiful......When (daughter) Riley told us about the rocks - we thought she was kidding because it sounded like a fucking joke, right?"

I'm with you Regan. I almost didn't write this post because for the longest time I thought this story was something dreamed up and written by the staff at The Onion.

Helsel complained to BuzzFeed that media outlets were reporting on the river rock plan and "taking it out of context to make it look silly."

Oh, no, Mr. Superintendent. It really IS silly.

Novel Defense For Accused Bank Robber: I Was Doing It For Art

From the New York Post: A surveillance image
said to be showing artist Joseph Gibbons robbing
a bank, reportedly for art's sake.  

If a report in the New York Post is to be believed, an artist and former MIT professor robbed a couple banks, not to get some quick cash, but for the sake of art.

Now that's a novel defense: It wasn't a bank robbery, your honor, it was a work of art.

Joseph Gibbons, 61, is accused of entering a Manhattan bank on New Year's Eve and demanding money while video-ing the whole thing on a camcorder.

Rhode Island officials say they were looking for Gibbons in connection with a bank robbery there in November.

Gibbons was an instructor at MIT for about nine years, ending in 2010, according to his bio.

MIT no longer has his information up on its web site, but a cached version says:    

"Gibbons' work in film and video is characterized by a time-honored approach - that of the artist's use of his own life as source material, a laboratory for self-observation and experimentation."

In a past interview with an art magazine, the Post said Gibbons said the following, though he was talking about taking drugs, not allegedly committing crimes:

"The romantic idea of the artist getting involved in these kinds of activities as a kind of research, gaining experience. But that was the big inspiration for me."

Then again, the Post also notes Gibbons hasn't really been employed for the last four years, so maybe he did need the money.

I'm sure this will all get sorted out in subsequent court cases. In the meantime, I think most creative people would be wise to not suffer quite as much as Gibbons appears to be doing for your art.

Wyoming Fails To Protect Itself from the Apocalypse.

I haven't been disappointed with a state as much lately as I am with Wyoming.  They had such a great legislative idea, only to abandon it, those jerks.

The state's House of Representatives was considering a bill that would have set up all kinds of defenses, including an army, weapons and even an aircraft carrier to protect Wyoming from the inevitable collapse of civilization, no doubt brought on by the supposed socialistic, pro-Muslim policies of Barack Obama.

Every state could use one of these. Buy one for yourself
if your state doesn't.

I know questions are being raised by readers right away. For instance: An aircraft carrier? In Wyoming?  I know what you're saying. An aircraft carrier might be a little impractical in a mountainous state with Wyoming, with few bodies of water and certainly no oceans.

But such negative attitudes toward aircraft carriers in Wyoming reflect a terrible lack of imagination that will surely be the ruin of this country, if the New World Order or something doesn't get us first.

As an aside, what exactly is the New World Order?  There was sort of a disco-ey, electronic band called New Order back in the 1980s? Is that band plotting world dominence? Seems odd to be ruled despotically by a disco band but what do I know?

Anyway, back to Wyoming and the aircraft carrier. People who criticize should realize: What if the the end of the nation through liberalism or whatever results in an ocean in Wyoming? The state was just trying to be proactive, covering all possibilities to keep it citizenry safe. What's wrong with that?

Sadly, however, the legislature rejected its preparation for the apocalype, so Wyoming residents are on their own if space aliens attack or something.

Worse, the aircraft carrier piece of the legislation was an amendment made by a Wyoming House member as a means of ridiculing the Wyoming Defense Bill.

Still, local defense in the face of the United States' collapse is probably a great idea. I think I'll lobby my local representative to the Vermont legislature to buy an entire army from some other country to defend us against, I don't know, another Phish concert



a band in 1980s and 1990s called New Order.